


The Prince

by dehautdesert



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Cockatoos, Friendship, Gang Rape, Halecest--Endgame, Horrible Things Happen (Mostly to Peter), Incest, Memory Alteration, Mindfuck, Morally Ambiguous Peter, Mpreg, Multi, Mystery, Peter Hale's A+ Parenting, Probably Soon To Be Jossed, Rape, Rape/Non-con Elements, Slow Build, The Sherriff's Name Is Sherriff, Underage - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-08-06
Packaged: 2018-02-11 00:14:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2045619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dehautdesert/pseuds/dehautdesert
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Set in Imaginary Post-Season 4 Land)</p><p>Malia finding out Peter is her biological father coincides with the return of the other side of her biological family--a strange, cult-like pack of werewolf separatists who see humans as prey and born wolves as superior to bitten. A pack whose charismatic alpha has terrible plans for Peter, Malia, and the rest of the pack. As Peter struggles to solve the mystery of his missing memory and Malia searches for the truth of her birth, a net has been closing in around them that they may not even see until it's too late.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> As mentioned in the tags this fic is likely to be jossed soon, and has the added inconvenience of being written by a lazy, inconstant bum. For these purposes I am pretending that everything in season 4 will be solved peacefully, and this fic takes place soon after.
> 
> Liberties have been taken regarding timeline and Peter's age, which confuses the hell out of me, Prologue and first chapter go up tonight, from there things may get messy. Let me know if you like.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As mentioned in the tags this fic is likely to be jossed soon, and has the added inconvenience of being written by a lazy, inconstant bum. For these purposes I am pretending that everything in season 4 will be solved peacefully, and this fic takes place soon after.
> 
> Liberties have been taken regarding timeline and Peter's age, which confuses the hell out of me, Prologue and first chapter go up tonight, from there things may get messy. Let me know if you like.

 

 

The moon was not full.

 

As if already trapped, the tough, stubby nails of the prey scraped against the forest floor, struggling against its own lack of speed to put greater distance between it and its pursuers. Rough bark tore skin from the creature's hide when its hind legs slipped out from underneath it and its leg was dragged over a long, thick root. It felt the pain, but didn't slow down for a moment more than it took to recover from its slip.

Still, no matter how hard it tried, how it pushed itself, how much pain flowed through the length of its muscles or how hard it got to breathe, it could not seem to go fast enough.

They were gaining on it.

It could not comprehend the meaning of human laughter. But when that very sound rang out into the air its fear increased all the same. It kept running as fast as it could, though the pursuers were stronger, faster—bigger too; their legs took longer strides. And there were many of them, a number higher than it could count, and each had the blood of an earlier kill on their body.

It didn't understand why they were chasing it if they had killed already tonight. How much food did their young require, after all? It had not come across creatures like these before. It was very rare it came across anything that would chase it at all. The big ones did not come to this part of the forest unless something had driven them to it. Even then, they would not pursue it or its kind half as far as these ones had. It was not ideal prey for any creature.

Except, apparently, for these ones. These ones, who ran only on their hind legs and yet were still somehow faster than anything it knew. These ones, who had two voices, and two scents; one of the forest, one of the place those who lived in the forest never went to. The confusing place. These ones, who were not of the forest, and yet had fit right in nevertheless. These ones, who were different.

Heart fluttering, it leapt over the bank of a small brook to avoid just the very slightest edge of one of those ones' claws. They were sharp; long and dangerous. It was lucky to have avoided more than the slight nick it got over the already raw skin, luckier still to make it to the other bank without slipping down the side, and luckiest of all that the lead pursuer mis-stepped and fell back into the stream. Not that that slowed them down much, but still.

Unfortunately, the small obstacle of the stream didn't deter a single one of them. They chased it through another line of trees, towards the hilly ground that would be far more difficult for it to traverse. There was already a slight incline in the ground below it, and it was having to put even more effort into its run. Effort produced from energy it could not afford to lose.

It didn't 'know' that it was going to die. It didn't have the ability to make predicative models even as short term as that, but it did know it was in danger of death, and was resolute. Although it realised on one level that its pursuers were more danger than it had ever known before, in the foreground of its mind it was only focussed on staying a step ahead of them.

So it ran. Its joints ached and breathing was getting ever harder, but it would run until they caught it, or until—

Until it ran into something else.

So focussed had its attention been on the things behind it, it had failed to see the thing in front of it until it had driven into it nose-first; and with its mouth open and panting its teeth had pricked the hide of the thing it collided with, and jolted it from its rest in an instant.

They were a big creature—bigger than its pursuers—and they snapped their head back and roared angrily at it as it flipped over its own head in an ungainly fashion and almost ran right into a tree in its haste to get away from this new threat as well as the old ones.

Those ones noticed the new creature right away.

"Shit!" one cried. "Shit, Uncle Robin—it's a bear!"

"I'll be damned, boy!" another growled back. Its voice was wrong somehow—two different creatures speaking at the same time. "A bear's a damn sight more fun than a fox! Wait 'til your daddy sees us bring this home!"

It did not understand the words. It only ran.

It no longer heard the voices of those ones after that, but the roar of the big creature could be heard all over the forest. Above it, birds flew startled to other branches. Other things moved in the underbrush. It kept running.

Further roars followed that one, the big creature's and those ones'. The sound of fighting. With those ones occupied and now—it realised, not following it, it slowed down a little, searching for a hiding place instead of an escape route. It was panting hard, out of breath and exhausted.

Meanwhile, back the way it came it heard the roaring of the others. It understood what it meant when the big creature's cries stopped and the howls of those ones continued. And it was relieved. Surely, surely, those ones had had enough for now.

It didn't understand the concept of luck.

But it had had a lucky escape.

 

 

*~*~*~*

 

 

The moon was not full.

Jethro heard whooping and hollering from miles away from the house before the others got back, felt his eyes glow with annoyance and shook his head.

Half his pack were wastes of space.

He sauntered out into the cool night air, coming round from the back to the front porch where the elders sat (they might call him an elder too, but in truth he was considerably younger than the others they called such) and the children played in the dirt below.

"They'll be here in a few minutes, I reckon," said Denton. He couldn't hide his discomfort.

"I know, boy," Elsie snapped. "I just told you I wasn't deaf, for Christ's sake!"

Denton squirmed. "I only meant to ask if Lawrence was coming down?" he mumbled.

"Alpha comes down when he's ready, boy," said Elsie. "You know that."

That may well have been, but Jethro felt his eyes flicker up towards Lawrence's room all the same, wondering why the man hadn't made his entrance yet. He'd already told him there were matters to discuss, and he'd been told in return that Lawrence wanted those matters put to rest before the 'party' started. He doubted Lawrence wanted anything brought up without him being there—as if they could decide on a plan of action without their alpha being there—so Jethro supposed he was just being lazy.

Even when the sound of the truck being driven up the road could be heard, Lawrence stayed put. Maybe he was hoping for some dramatic moment to reveal himself; Jethro honestly didn't give a shit. Soon as Henry and the others returned he was laying the facts before the pack and that was that. Rosetta and Crystal were already late; if Lawrence wanted to be filled in along with them before he made his decision, that was his problem.

The truck's tires rumbled over the dirt trail leading up to the house, engine roaring and rattling with some new technical malady Robin should have gotten fixed by now—he was supposed to be the mechanic around here, lazy piece of shit. Or maybe the huge hulking carcass tied up in the back was giving them trouble? Jethro smelled bear before he recognised the shape of it. He hadn't thought there were any left in these woods.

Trust Robin to wipe out the last of a local population though. The younger man jumped out of the truck laughing before it came to a stop and ran up the rest of the track yelling—

"Lawrence! Lawrence, we got a real winner, Lawrence!"

At the foot of the porch, the three youngest children looked up. Of the three, only Agnes had started to shift, and her early for her age, so their senses weren't as sharp as they would be yet and it was only when Robin yelled that his bastard cub heard him.

"Daddy!" cried the little boy, scrambling to his feet. The two girls watched curiously as their playmate ran up to Robin, whose pants were ragged and who wore nothing on his chest but gouts and gouts of black bear blood. He was shifted too, eyes glowing blue enough to cast a little shine on the blood on his face.

When he saw his brat approach he bent down and spread his arms to receive him, grinning wildly. "Ahh, how's my little wolf man?" he asked, scooping the child up and swinging him around.

The boy fake-growled and his father roared back. Then the kid noticed all the blood and made a face.

"Eww, daddy—it's blood!" he moaned.

"Blood of the kill, wolf man," said Robin. Holding the boy in one arm he swiped the fingers of his free hand over a particularly thick stream of blood and licked it up like barbecue sauce. "Mm-mm-mm!"

"Eww!"

Robin laughed. "You'll understand when you're older."

At that point the truck came to a stop at the top of the road and the others piled out, laughing and jumping like five-year-olds who'd been given sugar. Lily in particular, excited from her first non-full moon hunt, was bouncing off the ground with each step, strands of bloodied blonde hair falling into her eyes every time she moved.

Most of the adult betas had gone on the hunt. Not the elders, and not Rosetta or Crystal, who were out on their own hunt, but Henry and Lily—the alpha's older children, Courtney and Redford—the alpha's siblings, and Robin, Joseph and Elijah—the alpha's cousins, were all standing there bloodstained and baring fangs for the whole family to see.

"Y'all should come inside and get cleaned up," murmured Ann-Marie. She and the other omegas were sat on the bench below the veranda, all except Frida, who by this point might as well have been a beta thanks to Denton's favour, who stood by her husband.

Courtney gave her a dirty look. "We're fine the way we are, Ann-Marie," she said. Ann-Marie nodded and kept her head down, wisely leaving the matter there.

"Fine for at least the length of the celebrations, I think."

Most alphas exuded their power from every pore so their pack and any other wolves in the vicinity always knew they were coming. Their own previous alphas; Lucas, and then his daughter Carrie, had been like that. Lucas in particular had been so forward he'd gotten into trouble for it, flashing his eyes red at ordinary humans he felt like scaring and eventually scaring the daughter of a hunting family into blowing his head off with a shotgun.

Not so Lawrence. He could make it so you never saw, heard, or even smelt him coming until he wanted you to. Not that he had the power to mask his scent or anything, not in the traditional way. Only that he could make you not notice that you were noticing it. Even the gore-laden new arrivals who should have been staring right at him hadn't seen him until he'd spoken.

"Daddy!" cried Lily, and hopped up the steps to greet her father.

Lawrence put a gentle arm around her shoulders and touched his lips to her matted hair. The blood that was pressed onto his open white shirt didn't dampen his lazy smile even a little, stretching his gaunt and shaven cheeks beneath his hooded grey eyes. His normally slick black hair was mussed a little, giving Jethro the impression that he'd actually been asleep until just now.

"Hello, baby-girl," he said. "Did you and your brother have a good hunt?"

"The best!"

Their alpha grinned. "I'm glad, darling. Only the best for my baby girl."

"You should have seen it, Lawrence," laughed Robin. "Your girl got right up on the motherfucker's back, and your boy there struck the killing blow!"

"Language, Robin!" snapped Jemima.

Robin scowled. "I'll say what I like."

"You listen to your mama now, Robin," said Lawrence. He didn't look at his cousin, his red eyes fixed on the blood on his daughter's head, shoulders and upper body. He was subtle about it, but Jethro could tell he was inhaling the mixed scents deeply. "We mustn't use curses in front of babies."

"But blood and murder are fine?" asked Frida.

Jethro sighed. Denton shielding her from consequences and general lack of experience had made Frida a sight more foolish than Ann-Marie, that was for sure. An atmosphere of affront washed over the pack, and over that of the recent returnees especially. Joseph, Redford and Elijah made a move towards the omega, and though Denton's arm around her might have been taken as a sign of him taking responsibility for her, it could've also just been him reassuring her.

On the porch, Lawrence let his betas take three slow steps before he waved his hand to stand them down, smiling.

"Now then, Frida," he said. "We all know this is hard for you, your little girl about to be a fully fledged, bonafied member of this pack. What with where you came from and all, I'm sure you're uncomfortable, so I think we can let a few careless outbursts of a worried mother slide for just tonight. I do take care of my pack, Frida dear."

"I know," said Frida. "I know."

Less wise than Ann-Marie she may have been, but she was wise enough to know she didn't want her daughters to see her get the crap beat out of her and possibly her husband if she pissed the higher-ranking betas off too much. Though Lawrence was right in that it would be hard for a bitten wolf like Frida—hell, probably for any wolf raised to live in human society, to see what would happen tonight.

"Rosetta and Crystal still out?" Lawrence asked Jemima.

The older woman shrugged. "Damned if I know what those girls are getting up to," she growled. "You'd think it would be easy enough to find a suitable subject for tonight. If they ruin this I swear, Lawrence, you'll have to wait in line to tan their hides."

Lawrence chuckled. "I reckon I will, Aunt Jemima. I might just go easy on them if that's the case. Well, until they make their whereabouts known why don't you omegas prepare our feast for tonight? I can't say it's every day we get to have bear now, is it?"

Ann-Marie first and Frida last—and reluctant—the six pack omegas scuttled off to drag the bear from the back of the truck for skinning. While they set to work, Lawrence turned back to Jethro.

"Now then, Uncle Jethro, what was this important news you thought now would be the time to bring before the pack?"

Jethro sighed. _Finally_.

"Just something I was recently able to verify that I thought we should all hear about," he said.

Apart from the three children—four, he hadn't noticed Marcus gaming in the corner on that PS-whatever contraption—the pack betas were paying close attention to him. He reached into the pocket of his jeans for the printout from the online story; a little grudgingly, as it undermined all the complaints he'd made about having broadband installed at the house and how unnecessary it was.

He slipped it into Lawrence's fingers, and Lawrence stepped away from Lily to read the headline.

" 'Father's joy—daughter thought killed in car accident found alive after eight years.' Sounds very uplifting, Uncle-mine."

"The girl's _name_?" Jethro pointed out, rolling his eyes.

The red ones of the alpha quickly flicked back to the paper. Then widened.

"Malia Tate," he murmured.

That caused a stir in the pack for pretty much every member over thirty. The kids just looked confused.

Elsie was the first to lean forward and ask, "Are we talking about _our_ Malia, Jethro?"

Jethro nodded. "I went to some length to confirm it. Talia put the baby up for adoption a few days after it was born, listed Peter Hale as the father and Luna-Lee Lowell as the mother on the birth certificate."

"Loony-Lee?" asked Lily. "What does she have to do with anything?"

"Nothing at all, darling," said Lawrence. "You can trust me on that." He blinked and frowned at the paper. "From the looks of the date on this thing this all happened quite a while ago. She still in Beacon Hills?"

"She surely is," said Jethro. "And I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner, but the truth is there seems to have been a whole peck of trouble in those parts and getting anything accurate about it is close to murder. The upshot of it is the Hales came back, those that survived that fire, and there's a true alpha in town who apparently took out Deucalion."

"Deucalion?" Lawrence repeated, eyes narrowed. He took a long moment to consider the information. "I must say, while that does sound intriguing it also sounds mighty dangerous, Uncle. Are you saying one of the Hales is a true alpha?"

There was a can of worms.

"As far as I can tell? No. Everything I've heard points to some kid called McCall."

"I don't think I know a 'McCall' pack," said Hobart, deciding he was awake enough to join the conversation, which was a rarity, but then he was the oldest member of the pack, so it was also expected to a degree.

"That's because he ain't originally from any pack," Jethro said. "He's bitten."

"Bitten?!" spat Robin. "Talia Hale's territory's been taken over by some bitten boy and we have kin beholden to him?!"

"Ain't no kin of mine," said Redford, darkly.

His eyes were wandering towards Ann-Marie and the half-breeds she'd born Lucas. Such clichéd insecurity made Jethro hiss with contempt.

"As if you could fight an alpha who saw off Deucalion, bitten or otherwise," he drawled.

Redford looked at him furiously. "You watch your mouth, Jethro. I'm the alpha's brother, and you ain't even blood to him!"

Jethro let that one go because he couldn't bear to lower himself to having a serious argument with Redford. Other members of the pack had to be filled in, after all.

Henry growled. "I don't get it. Who's Malia, and who are the Hales?"

Lawrence sighed. "Oh, that's a long story, my boy."

"The long and short of it is she's family, though," Jethro told Henry pointedly. "And only a year younger than you."

Clearly the idea Jethro intended was then had, finally, and Henry made a face.

"You have to choose a mate at some point, son," Lawrence said, with a snort. "And a girl who survived on her own in the wild for eight years ain't just pack, she's true wolf. I know Lucas didn't want her in the pack, neither did Talia for that matter, but they're both dead now and no kin of ours will bow to a bitten wolf." He paused to grin. "Sides, if I'm not mistaken, Peter Hale was one of the survivors of the fire. I wouldn't mind putting him in the pack either."

Jethro rolled his eyes again. "That he was. But I don't know how much if anything he remembers of our last visit to Beacon Hills."

"I hear the girls, boys," said Jemima suddenly. Jethro realised he could hear them too, the old van that had been in the family almost as long as he had was rolling up from the direction of the town, and the girls with it.

He didn't know how they'd react to hearing Malia was alive or that Lawrence had mentioned bringing her and more than that Peter Hale into the family proper. They more than anyone had taken what had happened with Luna-Lee hard, but they'd also been itching to get new blood into the family more than anyone else. Lawrence had remained old-school as Lucas in at least one respect—breeding in the pack remained at the discretion of the alpha, and so far he'd only allowed his betas to breed with omegas. It was progressive enough that he'd allowed the children of those unions to be betas. Two of the omegas they had were Lawrence's own half-siblings by Ann-Marie, but Lucas hadn't entertained the idea of acknowledging them like that, even though they'd been his own.

Rosetta and Crystal had wanted new children for a while, and at seventeen Malia would be ripe for breeding. Her and the other youths Jethro had heard about; though rumour had it a lot of them weren't even bitten wolves, but humans. God only knew what was going on there, but Jethro intended to find out nonetheless, and not just to bring new blood into the family.

The van stopped in front of the house a few feet away from the bear carcass. Jethro could smell his nieces on the inside; them, and something else they'd found that was tied up and frightened out of its wits.

"What took you so long?" huffed Elsie, when the two women slid out of the vehicle.

They shared a look that spoke of one of their usual in-jokes. Then giggled.

"Sorry, Lawrence," said Crystal. "We wanted her first time to be as special as we could make it."

"We had to find just... the right... one."

Rosetta reached into the back of the van as she spoke, licked her lips and pulled out a struggling human boy.

Lawrence raised an eyebrow. "And this was the one that gave you the best vibes?"

The boy was Hispanic, about fourteen or fifteen with wide blue eyes and black hair, dressed in a marine-blue hooded jersey and jeans that were faded with wear and streaked with dirt. A bleeding scrape on his forehead spoke to a struggle with his captors, but a bruise on his jaw was older. Black electrical tape had been wound haphazardly over his mouth and the rest of his body, restraining him. Jethro didn't like it.

"You didn't think the locals would notice a missing kid?" he asked them, putting steel in his voice.

Crystal clicked her tongue. "What, you'd want us to expose little Aggie to some homeless freak, probably got AIDS and whatnot?"

"Since she wouldn't be able to contract the disease I can't say I see a problem with that!"

"All right, Jethro, settle down."

Lawrence nipped the argument in the bud with his arms raised, and turned his attention to the boy, regarding him carefully. The boy's terrified gaze swept from wolf to wolf, but kept landing back on Lawrence. Even without the senses of a werewolf, even without knowing that werewolves existed and he'd had the bad luck to be caught by a pack of them, Jethro knew the boy could tell who was the alpha.

For a while he kept trembling under Lawrence's piercing eyes. When a tear had collected enough weight that it fell from his eyelid, Lawrence finally turned back to the pack, as if the boy hadn't even been there. Instead, the alpha was looking at little Agnes, standing by Denton and her sister with confused and curious eyes that flickered yellow every now and then, particularly when they danced across anyone who was bloody.

"Come on up here, Agnes sweetheart," he told her. "Come see your alpha."

Frida jerked to a stop halfway through ripping the skin off the bear's left paw, but Ann-Marie took hold of her claw and put it back on the bear's skin without batting an eyelash. Denton swallowed and gave his daughter a gentle push towards Lawrence.

"Go on, princess," he said softly. "You do what Cousin Lawrence tells you. Daddy will be right here."

The seven-year-old looked from her mother to her father and then to Lawrence, unsure right up until Lawrence flashed his red eyes at her. It was only for a moment, but she hurried over up the steps of the porch, her little white dress fluttering like a spectre in the light of the waxing moon.

She stood before Lawrence and he crouched down to her level, hands on her small shoulders; him smiling, her with a face that didn't know what it was feeling, waiting for a cue that wasn't coming.

"You're getting to be a big girl, Agnes Lowell," Lawrence told her. "Do you know what your name means? What 'Agnes' means?"

Agnes shook her head.

"It's Latin. It means 'lamb'. And well, you might think that was inappropriate, considering—but me, I'm not so sure. After all, you wouldn't be the first wolf in sheep's clothing now, would you?"

Jethro sighed. He could already tell it was going to be a long night. Lawrence could spend hours spouting bullshit that seemed deep to the idiots that comprised the bulk of their pack. He wouldn't give Jethro an answer about Beacon Hills until tomorrow, like as not.

"You know why you're part of this pack, Agnes?" Agnes shook her head, black curls bouncing back and forth. "Long time ago, my grand-daddy and your daddy's grand-daddy, who were brothers, split up and made two different packs. But your daddy's pack got hit by hunters who wiped them out, all but your daddy and his two cousins... who are sadly no longer with us."

There were a few inane giggles among the pack. Denton hung his head either in embarrassment or fear. Jethro was just exasperated.

"So they came here. And we took them in, because family protects each other, and this pack is family. We protect each other from hunters, hunters who are strong even though they're human. Do you know what the hunter's code is?"

Agnes shook her head again.

"Their code is 'We hunt those who hunt us'. A good code, in my honest opinion. You see, when you become the hunter, the aggressor, you have the upper hand against your enemies even if they're bigger, stronger, or faster than you are. You put them on the defensive. Even a little princess like you can do that, and since this pack does hunt hunters, they keep to their code and hunt us back, so even little old you has to know how to hunt so you can protect your pack. Protect your sister."

He nodded towards Daisy, and Agnes' eyes followed him, observing the four-year-old clinging to their father's leg.

"Do you know what our pack's code is, Agnes? Because we have one too, just like the hunters. One my grand-daddy made for us. Do you know what it is?"

Again, Agnes shook her head.

"Our code is, 'Yellow is the coward's colour'. You know what that means, don't you? It means in this pack, in this family, we are all true blues."

Lawrence broke eye-contact with the girl and gestured with his head towards the pack. Agnes followed his gaze; first to the women who stood by the van, eyes glowing blue; then to the blood-stained hunters who gathered eagerly before them, eyes glowing blue; then to the omegas, who'd stopped their work momentarily to listen to their alpha talk, eyes glowing blue; to her mother whose eyes glowed blue alongside them; to the elders sitting on the porch, eyes glowing blue; to her father, Marcus, and Lily who had gravitated towards them, eyes glowing blue.

She locked eyes with Jethro, and he made sure his eyes glowed as blue as all the others.

The only ones there whose eyes were not 'true blue' as Lawrence described it were Daisy and Brad, who were too young to shift, and the boy Rosetta and Crystal had found, whose tears were erupting into full blown sobs, as he struggled against the tape.

By morning, his sobs had stopped.

And Agnes' eyes were also glowing blue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NOTES:
> 
> This fic proceeds on the idea that there is little physical difference in TW between omegas and betas, and omegas take different forms—not only that of the 'lone wolf' but, as evidenced by the twins, members of a pack who for whatever reason are seen as third-class. In the Lowell pack, omegas are usually those who were born human then bitten and brought into the pack, usually as a concubine, and—depending on the whim of the alpha—the children they produce.
> 
> Any other breeding in the pack is also done at the alpha's discretion, since the children of omegas are seen as unimportant even if they themselves are not brought up as omegas, while children of betas could be seen as threats to the main bloodline.
> 
> Since the Lowell pack is a big one but NOT all members are important to the story, I'm leaving a little George Martin-style 'players' sheet, so you know who's who in the Lowell pack without too much being given away concerning Peter and Malia's connection to them, and so you can check it if you get lost.
> 
> [LUCAS: The previous alpha and alpha at the time the Lowell pack was last in Beacon Hills. Deceased.]
> 
> [Adelaide: Lucas' mate and mother of his seven legitimate children. Deceased.]
> 
> Ann-Marie: A bitten wolf who Lucas made into his concubine; an omega in the pack.
> 
> Jamie and Trixie: Ann-Marie and Lucas' children, seen as omegas in the pack since Lucas never acknowledged them.
> 
> [CARRIE: Lucas' eldest and successor as alpha following his death. Reigned for only a few years before her own death and that of her children.]
> 
> LAWRENCE: Lucas' second-born and eldest son. Current alpha of the Lowell pack.
> 
> Courtney and Redford: Lucas' fifth and seventh-born respectively, and Lawrence's only surviving full siblings. Betas in the pack.
> 
> [Dillan, Clyde and Lorraine: Lucas' third, fourth and sixth-born, all slain in inter-pack fighting.]
> 
> [Rodney: Lucas' younger brother, killed by hunters.]
> 
> Hobart and Elsie: Lucas' younger brother and sister. Elders and betas in the pack.
> 
> Lizbet: A bitten wolf Elsie has kept as a concubine for many years. An omega in the pack.
> 
> [Chelsea: Lawrence's mate and mother of his three children. Deceased.]
> 
> Henry, Lily and Marcus: Lawrence's children; 18, 14, and 12 years old respectively. Betas in the pack.
> 
> Jemima: Adelaide's older sister, elder and beta in the pack.
> 
> [Carlisle: Jemima's mate; deceased.]
> 
> Jethro: Carlisle's younger brother, elder and beta in the pack.
> 
> Robin, Rosetta, Crystal, Joseph and Elijah: Jemima and Carlisle's children. Betas in the pack.
> 
> Luna-Lee: Also a child of Jemima and Carlisle, (between Crystal and Joseph in age) but has since left the pack.
> 
> Jack: A bitten wolf taken by Robin as a concubine. An omega in the pack.
> 
> Bradley: Robin and Jack's natural son, aged 5. Though he has not yet started to shift, it is assumed he will be seen as a beta when he does.
> 
> Denton: Lucas' cousin's son, driven to join Lucas' pack when his own was wiped out by hunters. A beta in the pack.
> 
> [Chance and Leon: Denton's cousins, who survived the massacre of their previous pack with him, but are both now deceased.]
> 
> Frida: A bitten wolf Denton has taken as his mate. Seen as an omega by the pack, but of somewhat higher status than the others.
> 
> Agnes and Daisy: Denton and Frida's children, aged 7 and 4. Agnes is now officially a beta in the pack and it is assumed Daisy will join her when she begins to shift.
> 
> Peter Hale: ???
> 
> Malia Tate: ???


	2. I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully the prologue didn't confuse you all too much. You don't need to understand it right away. Now for our beloved main TW cast. Central character of this fic is Peter, Malia second, with Stiles and Derek also important enough to be listed. Everyone else who isn't dead or put on a bus at the end of Season 3 still exists, but are not prominent enough for me to get people's hopes up when they're searching for those characters in the tags.

 

 

Ba-dum.

...

Ba-dum.

...

Ba-dum.

...

Sound could be every bit as important as scent.

...

Ba-dum (ba-dum).

...

Ba-dum (ba-dum).

...

The slightest waver in the vibrations around you could mean the difference between life and death.

...

Ba-dum (ba-dum).

...

A second pulse just a millisecond out of sync with his own heartbeat woke Peter from his sleep. She'd been good; she was used to hunting, moving silently enough that he didn't hear her until she got so close that her own nerves gave her away, her heart fluttering slightly quicker than it had been before, just enough for Peter to discern hers from the one inside his chest.

Inhaling deeply, he was able to recognise it was her.

_"You're not just an uncle."_

Without opening his eyes, he addressed the girl at his bedroom window, just loud enough for her keen ears to pick up.

"They told you, didn't they?"

He heard her shift on the windowsill, claws digging deeper into the brick, body shrinking back. He turned over and looked up at the girl, illuminated by the half moon and her own glowing blue eyes. Her brow was furrowed deeply, in anger, but more than that in confusion. Her distress was enough that words were already beyond her.

Still weak from his brief spell as a charred corpse stashed in the floorboards of the old house, he knew that if it came to blows there was every chance she'd win—even kill him, perhaps, her impulse control was not the best. But recklessness was part of his pathology as well, and so he stood up and opened the window.

"Would you like to come inside, Malia?"

The cool night air brushed over his bare skin. Had he had the choice he would not have had his first conversation with the kid as her father be with him in nothing but a pair of black boxers, but sometimes you had to improvise. Anyway, at least he wasn't naked.

Malia regarded him warily and stayed where she was with the same tense posture for at least half a minute. Peter didn't like to turn his back on her, but in the interest of making the conversation easier, he headed towards the kitchen. Still, he kept his eyes on her until the last possible instant when he slowly turned his body away.

It had the desired effect. While he pulled coffee mugs out of the cupboard and flicked the switch on the coffee maker, he felt Malia inch slowly through the window and into the room. His apartment was a large open-plan, so none of the rooms except the bathroom were walled off from each other. There was less chance of being ambushed in his own lair that way.

"Sugar?" he asked her.

She didn't answer. He checked back at her to see if she was nodding or if there was some gesture in her eyes, but saw nothing but the intensity of someone who didn't know what they were really doing—only that it was important. As such, he guessed she was deciding whether she should ask him a question or just attack him.

Coffee was poured into the cups carefully, and Peter decided to drop a few cubes of sugar into each. Kids usually liked sugar, he told himself, and so did he. He stirred the beverages for a few seconds each and took them both in hand.

When he turned back to her again he could see that 'attack' was winning out. He didn't blame her really, there were so many questions to ask it almost seemed more practical to get the beating out of the way before deciding which one to pick first. He hesitated, and put a not unsubstantial amount of effort into schooling his features.

He didn't want her to think he was afraid. Well, _know_ he was afraid. Though it didn't matter much to him he supposed to a teenage girl having everyone afraid of you might be upsetting. Even if it wasn't, showing weakness to a possible predator was never a good idea.

"Will it just be you?" he asked, moving towards her with one cup proffered. "Or can I expect the entire dream team to come bursting through the door in a storm of soap opera-worthy—"

The cup he was holding out for Malia was slapped out of his hand and knocked to the floor, leaving a few claw-marks behind on his knuckles. The porcelain broke, the coffee spilled; he'd barely have noticed if the scalding liquid that splashed up against his ankle hadn't burned him, and if any kind of burn these days hadn't sparked memories of the flames that still felt like they were seared into every inch of his skin then he'd have made some kind of witty remark.

As it was, he just stood there and tried to stay calm while the child growled at him with her left claw still pointing out. Apart from those growls, the room was silent for a long pause.

Peter felt oddly self-conscious. He put the other cup back on the counter and stood with his back still to Malia, because it felt worse to look into her eyes than it did to have his back unprotected. The stinging lacerations of the back of his hand were already closing.

The burns felt worse with every second. He healed slower since the resurrection; he knew that, but somehow he was sure burns were even slower to leave than other wounds. Like they just couldn't leave him alone.

He really needed to say something distracting right now.

"A simple 'no thank you' would have sufficed."

_Distracting,_ he told himself, as he was violently slammed against the fridge. _Not condescending._

Malia all but roared at him, claws digging into his bare shoulders, keeping him still. A part of him was screaming to disable her and run—she was, as he'd feared, stronger than he was but that didn't mean she was immune to his every move and he knew of a few that might have gotten him out of her grasp.

But there was another part of him that just didn't know what was good for him, and that stayed him from making a move. He kept his eyes averted so as not to aggravate her and spoke the first thing that came to mind as calmly as he could manage with her snapping jaws in his face and her hands pushing harder against his bones.

"You have questions, don't you, Malia?" he asked—using her name as a kind of prompt so she'd hopefully remember herself. "Who you are, who I am, why this has all happened." He paused. "Who your mother is. I can tell you now that I'm as curious as you are, but you have to believe me when I say we'll never get the answers without each other."

Malia leaned in closer, with a louder growl, and Peter shrunk back.

"Did your parents ever tell you that you were adopted?" he asked.

This time Malia didn't move. A quick glance at her eyes told Peter she had understood his question at least a little, and was considering an answer. At length, she opened her mouth.

"Mom couldn't have children," she said, voice distorted. "Both me and my sister were adopted. They said they didn't know anything about either of our birth parents."

That scratched Mrs. Tate off the list of candidates for someone he'd made a child with, and on the one hand it made sense, because she'd been considerably older than him, but on the other it was annoying because she had been the only actual candidate on the list.

No time to think into that in further detail with an angry teenage were-coyote on the verge of ripping his throat out.

"Well," he said. "Here's one of them. Surprise."

_You just had to do that_ , he thought to himself on his short trip being thrown to the cold floor. His arm fell on a bit of the smashed coffee cup and it pierced his skin; little red drops falling onto the cooling brown liquid. _You just can't stop being an asshole._

That said, it was probably best Malia learned early on that her bio-dad was an asshole. That way she wouldn't build up too many expectations for him to crush.

_Maybe you could even surprise her once and a while..._

Hissing in pain, Peter hoisted himself up onto his elbows just as Malia crouched over him, grabbed his neck, and forced it back down onto the ground, making her father grimace and arch his back, struggling not to grab at her arm and try to push her off as he knew it would only make things worse.

"Why didn't anyone tell me before now!?" she spat.

Peter tried to gasp some air to answer her. "To be completely honest, sweetheart, I only learned of your existence a couple of months ago, and I only met you one month ago. I don't know if your friends mentioned this, but I'm not exactly what most girls would consider grade-A dad material, and given your turbulent past I thought it was best to take my time to think it through."

"How much time were you going to take?!"

"That depends on whether or not I would have decided to tell you at all."

She squeezed his neck tighter, so he couldn't breathe at all. Now he couldn't stop himself from trying to pry her arm from off his body, though he didn't put all his force into it, and he didn't shift.

His eyes glowed though. He made them glow on purpose, another kind of prompt. Thankfully it seemed to affect her; her own glowing eyes widening in response, the pressure on his windpipe easing. He tried not to breathe too conspicuously.

In apparent disgust she snatched her hand away and stood up, nicking the skin on his throat with two claws.

"Why didn't they tell me then? They're supposed to be my friends!"

"I'm not sure all of them know," Peter told her. "Lydia definitely. Scott too, or at least I'm pretty sure, and if he knows then probably Stiles as well."

"Kira?" asked Malia hopefully.

Peter could only shrug. "You have to understand. I'm thirty-three now, which means I must have been sixteen when you were born, and at that time my life was pretty much controlled by my sister—your Aunt Talia. She was the alpha."

'Aunt Talia'. Even though Stephen and Amy's kids had called her that, it sounded so weird for him to use it in this context.

"Whatever happened and whoever it happened with, Talia decided that it would be best to remove my memory of the event. I knew for years she'd removed something," he paused to stand up, reaching for a tea towel to wipe the coffee away. "But I had no idea what it was until Lydia managed to get an impression from my sister's claws. And all it was, was that I had a child out there somewhere."

"And they're sure it's me?"

"The DNA test I had performed pretty much confirmed it," he admitted. It hadn't been that hard to follow her on one of her little teen lunch dates with the Beacon Hills junior Justice League and snatch up a cup she'd been drinking from.

She frowned at him for that, but let it pass. "If I'm your daughter, then why am I a coyote and not a wolf?"

On the list of things that bothered Peter about the whole secret daughter thing, that was about number five.

"Sometimes the shape you take reflects the kind of person you are," he said. "But only when you're bitten. You, Malia, are a born shifter, so most likely your mother was also a coyote. Possibly something else. Sometimes strange mixtures produce strange results. I don't remember having a girlfriend at that age, but that might only mean Talia took the memory of her away along with the memory of you."

"But you had sex with people?" asked Malia bluntly.

Peter raised his eyebrows. "There were a few." _Dozen_ , he thought privately. "I'm afraid I've misplaced my yearbook, so I couldn't point them out to you."

That was a lie—the yearbook had gone up in the fire with every other flammable thing in the house. Getting a copy from the school might have been an idea; and the little tykes were sure to be feeling the itch from not getting into trouble for at least a week.

The burn on his ankle was still painful.

Malia looked like she wanted to say something else, but couldn't think of anything except more growling. Something about her bothered Peter. He knew what her past had been, and frankly didn't consider it that bad excepting the deaths of her mother and sister. She certainly had more troubles now than she had living out in the woods, and contrary to what some people in her life seemed to believe, was not a nine-year-old in a seventeen-year-old's body. She'd grown and developed out in the woods, not the same as she would have in human society, nor the same as a human would have in her place. But something was bothering him all the same.

It wasn't her growling or her aggression—he got plenty of that from Derek. Yet now he thought about it the unnerving feeling was not dissimilar to what he felt around his nephew.

It was the eyes. The blue eyes that should have been yellow. Peter was hardly a person bubbling over with empathy, but he did feel bad for her for having to have those eyes; the same way he did for Derek. Yes, there was less guilt there than there was for Derek, but at the same time there was not no guilt. He supposed as her father this was the kind of thing he should have prevented from happening.

_You're an irresponsible parent_ , he told himself.

He almost smiled, but no sooner had the thought skipped idly into his head than he thought he could hear Talia sobbing from somewhere in the depths of his memory.

_"Irresponsible! Why do you always have to be so god damned irresponsible!?"_

Stilling, he racked his brains for what had been going on that had prompted Talia to have said that to him. He knew she'd said something along those lines when Paige died—she'd known about his part in it, of course she'd known—but though she had been angry she certainly hadn't been crying. No, she'd been quiet and deadly, this was something else.

He tried to play her words over again in his head for some other clue. _"Irresponsible. Why do you always have to be so god damned irresponsible."_ That voice had been verging on hysterical. Angry too, but not... how could he put it? Not like she'd been when Paige died. Not disgusted.

There had to be images that went with that voice. There had to be something. He closed his eyes and cast his memory back once more, because even though his daughter was right there in front of him and one of them should probably have been saying something, the fact that this little snippet of his past had popped up just as they were discussing Malia's mother made him think that maybe it was connected—maybe it had something to do with—

"Malia!"

Trust the Scooby Gang to arrive at the worst possible time. Stiles had been the one to call out (Peter considered it a mark of how far he'd fallen that he remembered Scott's human sidekick's name) but he could hear three—no, four other people with him. Scott was one of them, and he really should have noticed the approaching alpha before then, along with Derek, Lydia, and the fox-girl.

_Her name's Kira. You know that too, you pathetic little man._

"Oh," he said out loud. Malia was looking out in the direction her name had been shouted from, lips curled in annoyance. Peter sighed. "I guess I should make more coffee."

What he should have done in actuality was gone and opened the door, because Derek kicked it off its hinges as soon as he was in range, and the whole pack of them stumbled into the apartment with expressions that made him wonder if they'd been expecting to find Malia tied up for ritual sacrifice. A part of him wondered how they even knew where he lived.

Come to think of it, how had Malia known where he lived?

"Won't you come in?" he deadpanned, gathering the shards of porcelain together. It was days like this he wished the pack knew how to break in through a window like normal people.

"Malia!" said Stiles again, ignoring him. "Malia, I know this was a big shock for you, but trust me when I say that coming to him is not the answer."

The girl's eyes flashed at him. "Well what is the answer then?!" she shouted. "Why didn't you tell me this before!?"

"I wanted to tell you!" Stiles exclaimed. "But we also wanted you to settle in more first, and more importantly for you to know more about Peter before you started sending him Father's Day cards and mowing the lawn with him!"

"Mowing the lawn?" asked Scott.

Stiles ignored him. "The point is, he's dangerous. He is a dangerous, not good, murder-y, psycho-type person-thing... werewolf... zombie."

"Zombie?" asked Malia.

"Zombie?" Kira echoed.

"Long story," said Stiles impatiently. "To my knowledge, he does not actually feast on the brains of the living."

"Would anyone like a snack?" Peter asked brightly, feeling that was the opportune moment. Only Lydia rose to the bait, and only to give him a withering stare.

Derek too, but he didn't count.

"Shut up, Peter," he said.

"Shut up Peter! Shut up Peter!" said Cockatrice.

The room went entirely silent and every one of the interlopers stood stock still. Peter's eyes flickered up to the hanging fluorescent lamps where Cockatrice was waddling along, cocking his head this way and that. He'd almost forgotten Cockatrice was in the room—he must have been sleeping like a log until the door was kicked open, which reminded Peter of how much he hoped the neighbours hadn't heard that.

Calmly, he carried the pieces of the coffee mug to the bin and grabbed a few paper towels to mop up the liquid while the youngsters stared at each other.

"Everyone just heard that, right?" asked Stiles.

"What... the hell..."

Peter saw Derek looking up at the lamps and Cockatrice's bobbing head. The others followed his gaze and made various shocked expressions.

"Oh, it's so pretty!" cried Kira.

Smirking, Peter held his arm out and whistled for Cockatrice to come down to him. Cockatrice descended in a flutter of cherry-blossom plumage, diverting the attention of everyone—even Malia—from the current drama.

"You have a parrot?" Lydia asked him, dumbfounded.

"What are you, like, a pirate?" asked Scott.

The room went silent again, this time blanketed by the stupidity of Scott's remark. Peter couldn't help himself.

"Yes, Scott. The state of California requires that all citizens wishing to own a parrot must present proof of a fully accredited pirating licence by law. The days I'm not helping you kids are awash with hijacking booty and forcing wenches to walk the plank. Arr."

Scott looked suitably embarrassed that he ever decided to open his mouth. It was a little sweet though, because Kira had the kind of expression that told of someone who was glad they hadn't said the same thing first.

"His name is Cockatrice."

In all honesty Peter wasn't sure Cockatrice was a 'he', but he felt like one to him. He might have been able to tell by scent if he'd known the difference between the scent of a male and a female cockatoo, however, that was something that for some reason had just never come up before.

"Can we pet him?" asked Malia curiously.

Peter grimaced. "I'm afraid cockatoos are rather notorious for disliking strangers," he told them.

Cockatrice promptly flapped over to Scott's shoulder and landed with less grace than his elegant frame belied.

"... they act aggressively, and claw and bite at people they don't know."

With a contented cawing noise, Cockatrice rubbed his head affectionately against Scott's, who grinned like Christmas had come early and nuzzled the bird back.

"... and especially large groups make them nervous and unhappy, and likely to lash out."

The traitorous avian preened as all three girls reached out and stroked his light pink feathers, cooing delightedly at him.

"Whore," muttered Peter, shaking his head. He turned to an unimpressed-looking Derek while the children were distracted by the shiny bird. "I don't suppose you'd put my door back? I wouldn't want him to get loose in this weather."

Or in any weather. Cockatrice was such a naive thing that he'd probably try snuggling up to the nearest bobcat if he was ever let out into the world. Probably explained why he was so instantly attached to Scott—friend to all living and some undead creatures.

Derek continued to glare at him.

"I don't suppose you were ever going to tell me about the whole secret daughter thing?"

Peter blinked. "I thought you knew?"

"Well, I didn't." With a sigh, Derek moved to pick the door up. "I'm beginning to think we need a message board for dealing with all this shit."

Only beginning? Peter wondered. Well, he had to start sometime. Granted, a lot of the reason their little dream team didn't share information was the lack of trust and the fact that for the kids a lack of trust meant they were unwilling to even try to use the untrustworthy to their advantage—and to an extent that was smart.

Still, high risk yielded high reward; after all that was how Peter had brought himself back to life without eating anyone's brain. Maybe a little nibble of Lydia's, but that was all. It occurred to him there was much fun to be had dropping hints that he was a zombie to the pack children, maybe even the Sheriff; he looked like someone who was fun to mess with.

... he probably should have stayed focussed on Malia.

"Do you know who her mother was?" Derek asked.

"Only that it's not the one she grew up with," Peter muttered. They spoke quietly so the teenagers would carry on with Cockatrice. They were still able to hear them, obviously, but not while they weren't listening. "Other than that, nothing. I wasn't exactly going steady with anyone at the time."

Derek frowned, turning back from the door.

"We're talking around the time of your sixteenth birthday, right?" he asked, and Peter hadn't known exactly what time of the year they were talking about, but if Derek said so then he trusted him. "You did have a girlfriend though, didn't you?"

"I don't remember one," said Peter. His heart began to beat a little faster.

"No, I remember the day before your birthday you took me out to the ice rink because Mom said I wasn't allowed to go to the party, and there was a girl there with us. And she had a funny voice, I remember that."

"An accent, you mean?"

"Maybe." Derek folded his arms, eyes wandering to Malia. "I don't remember."

"Pretty boy!" said Cockatrice, making the kids laugh. Even Derek cracked a smile. Peter just rolled his eyes.

"Do you think you'd recognise her if you saw her picture? Because I don't have my high school yearbook, but if we could get a copy we might be able to pick her out. I mean... since Malia wants to know."

It bothered him that he got a look from his nephew that he'd expect a parent to give a child just then.

"You don't think Mom took the memory from you for a good reason?" he asked.

A good reason.

Those words had been on Peter's mind for a while now, in truth on and off ever since he'd noticed something was missing, which had gone all the way back to before the fire. Well before the fire. But he'd known that asking Talia directly wouldn't produce any results so he'd done his best to research the matter on his own.

What good reason was there for messing with someone's mind like that? Depending on how intimate the relationship he'd had with Malia's mother had been, they were talking about a significant chunk of memory, and the more memory you took—the more memory you implanted to replace it, rather, was the dangerous part—the greater the chance that something would go wrong.

As far as Peter could tell, nothing had gone wrong with his mental faculties, but sometimes he wondered all the same regarding his social impulses. There was just no way to know at this point.

But he did know Talia, and for all his resentment he had to admit he didn't think she'd go removing his memories like that at the drop of a hat. It wasn't exactly a slap on the wrist type of thing, he had to admit to himself that she probably only did it because she thought the memory might endanger the pack somehow.

Because she'd thought _Malia_ might endanger the pack somehow?

Given what had happened to Malia's own family, Talia might have been right to fear, but then if she'd been within the protection of the pack that would never have happened. And the incident had happened before the fire, so it was obvious Talia hadn't been keeping a proper eye on Malia. Had she not known the girl was in Beacon Hills?

"Shut up, pretty boy!" said Cockatrice.

Derek sighed loudly. "I'll talk it over with the pack. I just want to make sure we're not opening up another can of worms."

"All my cans have worms in them," said Peter. "I have a feeling they're going to go looking for them either way. Better that you and I are with them when it happens."

"Where did you get him?" asked Lydia suddenly, trailing her fingers along the feathers of Cockatrice's crest with a dazzling smile she'd never shown in Peter's presence before. It reminded him that cockatoos could also be trained as therapy animals. He'd read it on Wikipedia.

With a gesture to the room around them he replied, "Came with the house. The truly stunning example of humanity who used to live here left him behind."

"Do I need to make a remark about stones and glass houses?" asked Stiles pointedly.

"You can if you like, snowflake, but you should know I don't flinch under something as trivial as the bite of glass."

"Just the kiss of fire," said Lydia sweetly.

Peter's heart fluttered, eyes going dark. "Touché," he said, and forced a smile. "Now, it's somewhat past Cockatrice's bedtime at the moment, so if you would all kindly fuck off and reaffirm your love for each other elsewhere, Malia is free to come back once you've fully assured her of what a terrible person I am."

"You know for once I actually agree with you," said Stiles. He clapped his hands together and held his arm out. "Malia?"

Malia frowned as Cockatrice wandered off Scott's shoulder and back onto Peter's arm. One by one she regarded the vacant faces of her clueless friends and then looked back to Peter. Again, he could tell she wanted to say something but didn't know what.

"I'm sorry I broke your cup," she said awkwardly.

"That's all right," said Peter.

Speaking of awkward, the two of them were, for a while, just standing there and looking at each other out of the corners of their eyes. Peter didn't know what he could say to... well, he didn't even know what he wanted to do. A part of him was definitely protective of her, another had no idea who she was and kept telling him he really shouldn't care.

But even that part couldn't pretend it didn't care. No matter how ridiculous it was to care.

The dream team shared in the awkwardness for a few long seconds before Lydia huffed and turned to leave. Derek held the door away from the doorway for her—Peter really hoped he was going to come fix that at some point—and Scott and Kira followed her out, looking back every few steps as though they were being stalked.

Eventually, Stiles managed to herd Malia away, wrapping a gentle arm around her. Peter cocked his head and supposed she could do worse. As humans went, Stiles wasn't... entirely useless; he could say that for him. He could drive a jeep at any rate.

Peter watched Malia turn her eyes towards him one last time, glowing blue but now more anxious than angry.

_It would probably be better if you just pretended I didn't exist_ , _Malia_ , he thought.

Derek wasn't any more confident in speech than any of the others. The only one who was able to find something to say was, predictably—

"Cockatrice!" cried Cockatrice. "Pretty boy!"

The awkward stare on Derek's face became flatly unimpressed.

"He does have a way of ruining the moment, doesn't he?" Peter observed.

With another sigh of exasperation, Derek put the door back in its place, with himself on the other side of it. Thus Peter found himself alone in the apartment with the bird again.

"LMAO!" said Cockatrice.

"Your previous owner deserves to die for teaching you that phrase alone," said Peter.

With a deep breath he surveyed his formerly pristine apartment and the coffee soaked paper towel heap that was sticking out in the middle of his kitchen floor. There were also several shards of the coffee mug that had skittered over to the sides of the room with the force of Malia's frustration.

Poor girl. She was probably doomed to feel far more of that in the future, whatever Peter decided to do. Still, maybe next time she'd drink the coffee and restrain herself to punching him in the face like a normal person. He'd clean up before he had to face a floor full of broken crockery when he woke up in the morning.

The largest piece was the one the handle was attached to, and Peter went to that side of the room first to pick it up. Maybe he should have instituted a—

As he'd bent down the world had suddenly spun, and he'd almost fallen, having to grab onto the side of the oven for purchase and eventually dropping to his knees. There were no words to describe the disorientation of feeling perfectly fine one second and then being unable to stand upright the next.

Sudden dizziness was not a familiar feeling for him. Since the fire, and the coma that followed it (catatonic state more than a coma, to be honest) most of Peter's psychosomatic issues had either manifested while he was asleep, or as phantom burning sensations in the parts of his body that had once been scarred over.

The sensations were rarely as pleasant as this light-headedness, but at least they were familiar. This was...

This was frightening.

Cockatrice fluttered his wings to keep upright and ended up perched above Peter's spine, right where his neck met his back. It felt like Talia's claws at his neck again, ready to screw around with his mind, and he knelt as still as he could, resting on his knees and elbows.

Breathing heavily.

...

Ba-dum.

...

The window was still open, but it only seemed to be getting warmer.

...

Ba-dum.

...

"I think maybe we should call it a night, pretty-boy."

"Pretty boy!"

...

Ba-dum.

...

Peter closed his eyes and managed to stumble slowly back into his bed, closing the window to prevent the stupid bird from getting out. He ignored how suddenly stifling it felt and prompted Cockatrice to edge down his arm so he could drop onto the bed. He felt a lot better lying down.

...

Ba-dum.

...

"What the fuck am I supposed to do?" he whispered.

"LMAO!" said the bird. Peter snorted.

"You're such an asshole."

...

Ba-dum.

(ba-dum).

...

As if in protest, Cockatrice rested his head against Peter's chest with a soft cawing noise, rubbing against him like a cat. That was one thing you could say about the bird. He was certainly affectionate.

...

Ba-dum.

(ba-dum).

...

Then with his bold pink crest extended, Cockatrice shuffled down his side and began cuddling against his stomach.

Something he'd never done before.

"Lullaby!" he cawed. "Lullaby!"

...

Ba-dum.

(ba-dum).

...

Peter's heart abruptly began pounding at an unprecedented rate.

...

Ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum.

(ba-dum).

...

There was someone there who shouldn't have been.

...

(ba-dum).

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Review if you feel like it, ask if you have a question and let me know what you'd like the endgame to be pairing-wise. Chapter two is about two fifths written. Expect it by the end of the week. Probably.


	3. II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have more of an idea where I'm going with this fic now, and have updated the tags accordingly. Enjoy a chapter from Malia's point of view, in which Peter dispenses "fatherly advice", such as he sees it.

 

"I still don't see why we can't just take the book and bring it back later," Lydia said, heel tapping against the floor. "I mean it's not like fifteen to twenty-year-old yearbooks are in high enough demand to have an overnight absence noticed."

"It's better this way," Scott insisted. "We don't run the risk of getting caught with them, and if someone finds us in here... then Stiles can make up a random excuse."

"I can?" asked Stiles.

Kira turned the next page of the book and shoved it back into the scanner. "I still don't see why we couldn't ask to copy the pictures for a school project. I'm sure my dad would cover for us."

Stiles rolled his eyes. "Yeah, they've been pretty uptight about the whole data protection thing after what happened with Matt; as if he picked his targets out of the yearbook or something. So mostly we're doing this because they're idiots."

Malia agreed.

They were all idiots. Idiots for living like this, idiots for making things hard like this, idiots for wasting so much energy on trivial nothings, idiots for blathering on about concepts that didn't even make sense to those who'd written them on and on, every day of the week—'ad infinitum', as she and Scott had learned that morning.

And she was the biggest idiot of them all for trying to go along with it.

"That reminds me; what book did you choose for the independent project?" asked Scott, smiling at them from the doorway—all of them, but mostly at Kira.

"Oh, uh... well, I thought it would be interesting to do something kind of sciency, so I went with _Origin of Species_. I mean, we don't actually have to read the whole thing if it's a whole book."

Lydia looked up from where she'd been studying her nails.

"Oh, what edition are you doing?"

Kira blinked at her. "There's more than one?!"

"Uh... and what did you choose, Malia?" Scott asked quickly.

What did she choose?

She clenched her fists. Kira's dad was nice, he'd come up with a three-book list he said she could choose from if she was feeling stuck, but even looking at those three titles made her frustrated, because she felt like she should know more about them than she did, even after Scott had looked at the list and admitted to never having heard of any of them.

But she didn't want any of the others to know. They helped her enough already.

"I'm still deciding," she said grumpily, and hoped they'd leave it there.

They did, but there was a silence that followed that spoke loudly enough that they might as well have crowded around her to offer platitudes and assistance, as if she was a baby.

She was the same age as the rest of them. She'd hunted and killed on her own for years to survive. Her eyes glowed blue when any of the others would still be yellow.

And yet, there were times when they rushed to see who could coddle her the most. She much preferred when they forgot she wasn't like them. When she didn't long to run back to the woods and the cave that had been her home; the home she'd lain in for long cold nights longing to return to a different home, one she'd destroyed with her own claws.

_Why?_

"Well, I bet Scott hasn't thought of anything either, have you, Scottie?"

Stiles breathed fresh air into the room and took a little of the load off her heart while Scott looked up to the ceiling like he expected to see the answer written there. It was a look she knew had been on her face many times over the past few months, and it made her feel something. Empathy, Stiles called it.

He was good at stuff like that. It was part of the reason she liked him. That and the sex.

"Uh... I was either going to do the Freud book... or the Orwell essay."

Those were two of the ones on Malia's list.

"Nn, better stay on the safe side and keep away from Freud," said Lydia, a strange, disturbed look on her face.

"Orwell it is," said Scott. "He's the one that wrote _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ , right?"

"Yes," said Lydia, exasperated.

"And he made that movie, _Citizen Kane_ ," Kira piped up.

"No," said Lydia, in the exact same tone. "That was Orson Welles."

"Oh." Kira turned the next page of the yearbook. "Hey, look! There's Peter."

Malia stepped towards the kitsune immediately and craned her neck around the smaller girl's head. The heading at the top of each glossy page proclaimed the pictures below as 'Class of '98', portraits of which there were four on each page. At first she didn't recognise any of them, but dismissing the five female students and the one black guy left two possible choices on those pages, and when she focussed on the neatly printed names below them she found it difficult to reconcile the Peter Hale she... had met, with the smirking teenager in the photo.

That smirk was different, for one. Lighter. A few seconds of looking at the picture helped her see how this could be a younger Peter, but his eyes were so much brighter, his face softer, more... what was the word of last Tuesday?

Ethereal. That was it.

"He was actually kind of cute," said Kira.

A popping noise told Malia that Lydia had taken the top off of one of her markers, but she was still looking at the picture as if there was some clue to be had in the young Peter Hale's eyes that would give her all the answers the real deal had completely failed to deliver. A moment later, a black marker descended over the image and Lydia scribbled a moustache onto Peter's face.

Unable to help herself, Malia snorted with laughter. Stiles crowded around the book at the same time and grinned.

"Don't forget his goatee," he said, prompting Lydia to draw one far more prominent and pointed than Peter actually had. "Oh, and give him like, a little monocle as well, like he's Snidely Whiplash."

"You should draw in Cockatrice too!" said Kira excitedly, and soon Scott had tiptoed away from the door to look at Lydia's artwork.

This moment felt like they were all on the same page. Giggling softly, Malia could ignore all the anger and frustration she'd been feeling until—

"Glad to see you're all hard at work."

They started away from the book. A familiar person stood behind them.

"Derek?" said Scott, blinking and looking from the door and back around the room in wondrance as to how the older wolf had got in.

How her cousin had got in, a little voice reminded her. _Cousin_. It seemed so weird to think that was what this person was; this person she barely knew at all and that her friends were so much more familiar with, like everything else in this place.

"Oh my _god,_ Derek," Stiles gasped, hand going to his chest theatrically. "Tell me there is another entrance into this room than that doorway!"

Derek stared at him. "No, Stiles, I punched my way in through the wall."

Stiles blinked. "Really?"

"Dude, I would have noticed _that_ ," Scott told him, vaguely offended.

"Oh, right."

"What are you even doing?" asked Derek, shaking his head at them.

The five teenagers exchanged quick looks and then Kira proffered the yearbook with the vandalised picture and an innocent expression on her face. Derek's eyes found the picture of his uncle at once, regarded it for a second, then responded with a dry chuckle that put a smile on Lydia.

"Very funny," he said, deadpan. "Are these the yearbooks you wanted me to look through?"

"You said you remembered Peter being with a girl the night before his sixteenth birthday," said Scott. "I mean, we all know it's a long shot but right now it's all we have to go on in finding out who Malia's mother is. And she deserves to know. I think Peter deserves to know too, for that matter."

Malia couldn't have missed Derek rolling his eyes at that, but she also noticed a modicum of fondness in the gesture—likely towards Scott, and not to her or Peter, not that she minded much. She'd gotten to know Derek a little better during the incident with the 'Benefactor', but now that they were suddenly cousins that earlier acquaintance held a note of falsity in it.

"Yeah," said Derek, "well, Peter should have learned how to handle disappointment by now." He turned to Malia. "Trust me, Malia, more than anyone I understand why this is important to you, but I can't shake the feeling that this is a road we don't want to go down, even if it is to find out who your mother was."

Derek was wrong. He didn't understand at all.

"I know who my mother was," she growled at him. "I killed her. What I want to know is why."

"Malia..." Kira said her name but she ignored it and stared right into Derek's eyes.

"Someone adopted me out to a human couple who had no idea how to handle me. I know Peter definitely had the memory removed so whatever else he's done he wasn't responsible for this. If it was your mother who put me up for adoption then I want to know why. If it was mine, I want to find her and confront her with the consequences of what she did!"

Stiles hand curling around her own made her realise her claws were coming out. She closed her eyes and imagined them disappearing, then when she looked again, they were gone. If nothing else she was getting better at controlling the shift.

Her cousin held her gaze without blinking for a while before he replied.

"Okay."

"So you will help us?" she asked.

Unenthusiastic though it may have been, he did nod in response. "I guess I can at least look at a few pictures. But I want you to understand here and now that what we find might be difficult for you to accept. Peter's a wolf and you're a coyote, that doesn't happen very often, and it could mean something bad."

Everything seemed to mean something bad in this town. Malia was determined to see it through regardless.

But Lydia's curiosity was piqued.

"What kind of bad?" she asked.

"Peter said the most likely explanation was that my mother was a were-coyote too," Malia said.

Derek tilted his head; averting his eyes for a split-second then looking straight back at her.

"That _could_ be it," he said. "But your kind are rare. They don't form packs the way wolves do, and even when they're born into one they usually leave and fall prey to hunters. Sometimes they're driven out. A lot of us associate coyotes with bad luck."

Malia supposed she shouldn't feel offended. Though she had only herself to go on, so far that suspicion seemed to be proving right.

"Why?" asked Kira, as though that were a stupid opinion to hold. It made Malia feel a little better.

"Because if a coyote is born to a pair of wolves, it usually means there was something... wrong, either with the pregnancy, or with the conception. I've heard stories of one or more of the parents being possessed at the time, or performing magic they shouldn't have been, or..." he trailed off.

"Or?" Stiles prompted.

"... or simply that the conception was non-consensual. But when it comes to Peter I'd lean a lot more towards 'doing magic he shouldn't have been' than that. I mean, whatever else he is, he's not..." again, he couldn't finish.

"A rapist?" Lydia finished for him. "I don't know, Derek, you've never had him inside your head, and while I'll admit nothing of _that_ sort happened while your uncle and I were 'roomies', so to speak, I still can't quite put it past our resident town creep."

"Lydia, there are very few people who've met Peter that didn't get him inside their head one way or another, and he is probably the creepiest person I know... but I don't think he'd do that."

If he had Malia didn't think she'd know, but then she'd never met a rapist to her knowledge.

"Would your mom have covered it up for him if he had?" asked Stiles.

That was the kind of smart question Malia felt she should have asked.

"Definitely not," said Derek.

"Maybe they were in love?" Kira suggested.

Apart from Malia, the others stared at her like she'd suggested hiring Peter as a children's birthday-party clown. Kira was undeterred.

"He could have fallen in love with a beautiful were-coyote whose parents didn't want them to be together and they forced her to give their baby up for adoption, and then took her away—and he was so devastated that he'd never see her again that he fell into, like, a deep, dark despair and Derek's mom had to remove all his memories of their love just to get him to live again!"

"No," said Derek, with a tone of finality.

"It could've happened!"

Only, Malia knew it couldn't. She could count the number of times she'd met the man on the fingers of one hand, but her instincts had been honed through years in the wild, and she was more than sure the man who'd casually joked as she'd flung him around his own apartment was not the type to wallow in misery.

No, if something he wanted had been taken away from him, unless the odds were insurmountable then he would have done something about it. That might have been why his memory had been taken—whatever had happened, whatever reason it had been a bad idea for the Hales to keep her—he had been about to do something about it and Derek's mom had thought it would be too dangerous.

It was funny how hearing Kira get it so wrong had brought something to mind that seemed so right. That was one of the things she liked about Kira. One of many.

_Too many_ , a part of her feared.

"Yeah, it could have," said Derek. "In _Disneyland_. Now before we go on to anything even more disturbing I have something to tell you all. The reason I came here was because I caught a strange wolf's scent out near the Preserve. It could be nothing, but I wanted to let you all know in case it wasn't."

Scott nodded, his demeanour becoming serious at once. Even though he was an airheaded dork most of the time, that one small movement gave Malia an impulse to fall in line before him or something. Because he was the alpha, she guessed. She wasn't always sure about how to feel about those impulses; her animosity towards Scott had dwindled to practically nothing, but she didn't like the idea that she was biologically predisposed to follow his lead either.

"I'll let Liam know too," he said.

"You do that."

"Maybe he and I could do some... you know, patrolling werewolf types things," Scott went on awkwardly. "To help him with control and stuff."

"Hey, that's a good idea!" said Stiles. "That's totally a thing we could, you know, do."

Derek sighed. "Just be careful. All of you."

"Oh, come on, Derek—when are we ever not careful?"

 

 

*~*~*~*~*

 

 

Days at Beacon Hills High School always passed slowly, as Malia was no longer allowed to go wherever and whenever she pleased simply knowing that the restrictions were there made every class last a lifetime, even though she'd been able to spend hours on end doing nothing when she'd been back in her own territory. It was some small comfort that most of the rest of her class seemed to feel the same way.

This day was passing even slower though. When they'd had the 'Retrieve Peter Hale's Yearbooks' mission to focus on she'd been able to distract herself by imagining Derek flipping through the pages of some massive leather-bound tome that ended up being nothing like what high school yearbooks actually looked like, eyes widening as he slammed his hand down on the page and cried out 'That's her! That's the girl!'.

But now she was sitting back and thinking about the parent she did know. Satan-in-a-v-neck dad. Homicidal killer-of-his-own-niece dad. Brain-invading-zombie-sorcerer dad.

Malia's dad.

No, that wasn't right. Malia's dad lived in a quiet house on his own and saw her as often as either of them could bear. She still hadn't told him about what really caused the accident—had babbled some variation of 'it was all my fault' and been showered in hugs and kisses that had been meant for the nine-year-old girl she'd once been, platitudes of 'of course it wasn't your fault' and no will to bring herself to say otherwise.

To be fair, it kind of left her with no leg to stand on in being angry at the others for keeping the truth about Peter from her.

As for her being the daughter of a mass-murderer, she was hardly having an existential crisis about it.

Sure, she didn't like it. She worried sometimes that it was because of traits she'd inherited from him and not eight years of solitude that she had difficulty with the whole universal compassion thing, and that when Stiles and Kira figured that out they'd stop trying so hard with her. But she was making progress compassion-wise. It annoyed her now to think of any member of the pack being left behind, not just Stiles, but Kira, Lydia, Scott, and even Derek and Liam.

It kind of made her wonder if Peter counted as part of their pack.

Her thoughts lead her back to the encounter she'd had the night before. The first time she'd met Peter she'd been mostly underwhelmed in the evil department; he'd seemed more like the Angelica to the pack's Rugrats than the Sauron to their fellowship. When she'd seen him last night though, that's when she'd got more of a measure of him, though she hadn't seen it at the time.

A long time ago she'd watched a nature documentary—the kind that stuck in your mind and you didn't know why. She remembered very little of it except that there had been a kind of bird that cleaned the teeth of crocodiles; sticking their head in the reptile's mouth and trusting that it wouldn't bite it off.

Peter had been like one of those birds, teasing her with light-hearted barbs, testing how far she'd go before she snapped her jaws shut. She had no doubt that he could be the crocodile too when he wanted, and let the little birds peck at him to their hearts content, knowing he could close his teeth around them at any moment.

Well, not at any moment. She knew he'd lost most of his strength after coming back from the dead. But he was still very dangerous; her instincts told her that, and her friends backed it up.

And yet... she wanted to see him again.

Doing what you wanted whenever you wanted was a difficult habit to break. While it did occur to her that the others did not want her to meet with Peter without their supervision until she'd built up enough of an immunity to his particular brand of evil, she didn't think their concerns were necessary. She knew how to handle herself.

Thus the best course of action as she saw it was just to go there without telling them before they knew she was gone. They weren't her babysitters after all. She went places on her own when she wanted, and they wouldn't know where she was headed, so even if they did figure it out it would be a while before they caught up.

They would worry, yes. But that was something she wanted to teach them not to do, so this was a good plan all around, she felt.

So she sent a short 'went home' text to Stiles and skipped her last class, which was math so no great loss there, then mulled over whether to get the bus or just run there for about a minute. Peter's apartment was quite a way away from the school, in a section of town mostly filled with commuters to larger cities. Most of his neighbours had been absent the night before, luckily for him.

In the end she went with the bus, telling herself this concession to social norm would balance out the whole skipping class thing. It was a success, in that no one gave her strange looks. She'd taken the bus on her own a few times before the accident, though never with the permission of her parents. They'd always been protective of her.

She'd always preferred to do what she wanted, and maybe she'd gotten that from Peter too.

Soon enough she found herself in front of his apartment building, and with a quick glance around to make sure no one was watching, she climbed up to the second floor, claws scratching into the brickwork.

Just as the windowsill was in her grasp she heard a flutter and looked up at the window; dark in the light of day. The bird, 'Cockatrice', was staring down at her with his head twitching from side to side, visible quite clearly as he was right up against the window. Stupid bird. If he hadn't distracted them all last night with his cuteness they might have been able to have a proper conversation.

"Lullaby!" cried the bird. "Pretty boy! Pretty boy!"

A few seconds later, Peter Hale dropped into view, resting on folded arms.

"Hello, Malia," he greeted her.

She hoisted herself up so she was crouching on the windowsill, with her claws trailing over the same marks they'd made the night before. Looking back on it, watching a mostly naked Peter sleep from his window had probably been kind of creepy of her.

Peter was now fully dressed in tight jeans and a long-sleeved navy-blue v-neck as he ushered Cockatrice up onto his shoulder and turned the locks on the window to open it.

"Do come in."

Malia climbed inside, taking a look at the interior of the apartment in the daylight. The mess from the night before had been cleaned; the one she had made anyway, there was a lot of dust by the front door where Derek had kicked it off its frame. The door itself was still propped up against said frame and she could smell some kind of glue around it.

The rest of the apartment was very modern-looking; black tiles, high black ceiling with fluorescent light fixtures, black furniture and white walls. A kitchen/diner on one side and on the other one part with a bed, dresser and a desk, the other with a sofa and a TV and stereo system. Bookshelves lined the far wall next to the door that presumably lead to a bathroom. There was a Japanese painting on the wall opposite her, above a huge bird cage, and Malia just had enough time to see a shadow move out of the corner of her eye before Peter had turned a framed picture on his bedside table face down.

So Malia wandered over and turned it back up at once. Peter just snorted.

There were a dozen people in the photo; men, women and children. She recognised Derek first, about the same age Kate had regressed him back to when she'd taken him to Mexico. He was sitting on the floor in the picture with his arms around his knees, grinning. On his right was an older girl, on his left a younger boy and an even younger girl Malia was pretty sure from photos on Stiles' phone was Cora. There was a boy about the same age next to her and they were all sitting in front of a wooden settee with violet cushions.

On the settee, the central figure of the photograph, was a dark-haired woman who somehow exuded power through the picture.

Talia Hale, Malia told herself. She was seated between two little girls, one of whom was next to a man who looked so much like Derek it could only be his father, the other was next to a blonde woman with a male toddler on her lap. A second man was standing behind the settee, leaning forward on it between Talia and the other woman.

"You're not in it," Malia observed.

"I took it," Peter explained. "At the time it seemed appropriate, me being the proverbial black sheep of the family. Can you tell who the werewolves in the photo are?"

Malia frowned at him.

"The eyes of most shape-shifters refract light in a certain way," he told her. "Even when they're not glowing they look like they are on film, it's a rather uncanny effect. We've learned to use a special lens to record all our happy family memories." He paused. "Or wear contacts. Very annoying contacts."

"Like for your yearbook photo?" asked Malia. There had been no glowing eyes in that. "We copied them out and gave them to Derek to look over, by the way."

Peter nodded. "I suppose I should leaf through them myself," he said. "Mark out the ones I do remember having a special relationship with."

"Sex," said Malia, bluntly.

"I believe that is the vernacular, yes. Is that all you came to say?"

"Shut up, pretty boy!" cried Cockatrice. "LMAO! LMAO!"

While Peter rolled his eyes at the cockatoo's interruption Malia realised there wasn't really any particular reason she'd come. She shrugged and went back to the picture.

"Is there a way to tell the werewolves apart even with the special lens?" she asked.

"Why don't you tell me?"

_Asshole_ , thought Malia. She scowled and put the photo back down on the table, face-up. A part of her was ready to just leave and come back when there was actually a reason to, preferably not until it was a matter of life and death, but another part felt like someone was bolting her legs down onto the floor of the apartment.

Cockatrice abruptly decided to leave Peter's shoulder and fly back up to the hanging lamp. In daylight he looked far pinker than the almost white he'd been the night before, and even more out of place as the companion of a homicidal maniac. She followed him curiously with her eyes, only distracted when Peter slapped his hands against his hips.

"Well, can I get you anything?" he asked. "I know the coffee didn't go over too well; how about a scotch? Or I could dispense some fatherly advice?"

"What kind of _advice_?" Malia couldn't help but scrunch her face up.

"I don't know, what do fathers and daughters usually talk about? Boys?"

A name never far from Malia's mind escaped her lips. "Like Stiles?"

"I believe he is indeed a boy," sighed Peter. He probably already knew they were together. Perhaps he disapproved, in which case tough luck for him.

"I don't think I really need your advice on Stiles," she told him. "I like our relationship the way it is. He's nice, and he's good at sex, so there isn't really a problem."

Peter winced. "Surely you could do better than him though? Why date a dime-a-dozen human when there's a true alpha in town?"

"No, I like Stiles. Besides, Scott's with Kira, and I don't think I'd want to have sex with him anyway, he's too... muscle-y. I'd have sex with Kira, probably—she's pretty and she has nice boobs, but I don't think that would ever happen."

She didn't really mind telling Peter this. Why should she? She doubted he'd go tell Kira; Stiles hadn't when she'd told him, he'd simply accepted it and said it would be hot, if extremely unlikely. Who knew, maybe Peter would have something useful to say on the matter?

"It could," he said, seemingly unfazed. "The closer you get to Scott, the more access you have to him when he's vulnerable. If you killed Scott when he was least expecting it then coyote or no, you would become the alpha and then you could have Stiles, Kira _and_ a kind of power you could only ever dream of otherwise."

Maybe not.

"I don't think they'd want me like that if I'd killed Scott."

"Well, you obviously wouldn't tell them it was you who did it." Peter began walking slowly, oh-so-casually and in an undeniably predatory fashion around the apartment, pretending to be interested in various objects around the room. "Trust me, there are no end of scapegoats you could pin the murder of that kid on."

"You being the top of that particular list?"

Index finger extended, Peter smirked. "Touché. The point is I'm not saying you necessarily _should_ kill Scott, just that it's an option you shouldn't dismiss offhand."

"And yet that's exactly what I'm going to do."

"Whatever you think is best. Anything else I can help you with? Werewolf issues? Homework? How to come out to the man who—"

Just as Malia prepared herself to get angry at whatever Peter was about to say, and she had a good idea what he was about to say, he gave a little gasp and stumbled against the island in the middle of the kitchen, claws suddenly shooting out and grasping against the marble for purchase before he had steadied himself lying half on top of it.

Malia's heart beat faster. She took a step forward.

"Are you okay?" she asked him.

He didn't answer for a while, and she could hear his heart rate increase from steady to racing in a couple of seconds. Not just racing either, but irregular, and the instinct that had been saying 'predator! predator!' a moment ago was now telling her that the man was sick.

"Peter?"

"I'm fine," he snarled between pants. He turned his head a little and she could see his eyes glow blue. His heart rate didn't alter when he spoke, but she knew he was lying. She wasn't stupid.

For the next few moments she looked around the apartment wondering what to do. Call someone? Derek? Scott? Scott had Deaton's number and he might have known what was happening. Maybe Peter had been poisoned and he just needed one of those cuts to release the toxin. Or maybe he'd been doing some kind of evil magic that was sapping his strength.

A strange shift in the air made her realise that his body temperature was spiking, and a moment later he was struggling to pull his shirt off while still resting his body weight on the counter.

"Should I..."

"I'm fine," Peter repeated shoving the garment away. "I'll be fine, I just need to lie down..."

He pushed away from the island, stumbling dizzily over towards his bed, gasping for breath. Instinct was now pulling Malia in two different directions, one to stay back and observe, the other to go and help him. She chose the former, though she went two steps towards him when he dropped to the ground and began half-crawling.

It was when he reached the bed and dug his claws into the mattress that she saw it. His head was down, pushing the back of his neck out, displaying the marks that were on it.

Claw marks.

"Your neck," she muttered.

"What?"

"Your neck—there are marks. Did you ask Scott to take a look inside your head?"

He gave her a withering look that had her take those two steps back.

"No," he growled. "No, I did not."

 

 

 

*~*~*~*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter is partially written, and will also be mostly in Malia's POV, but also partially in Derek's. I hope people are enjoying this fic, leave as much mindless worship as you like with my sincere thanks.


	4. III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this is the last chance I'll have to post a chapter before the new episode airs, (I live in the UK, so I won't see it until Tuesday) and if everything gets jossed then... I'll just pretend it didn't and move on. In this chapter; Malia eats Peter's food and reads his diary, and a new threat makes first and then second contact.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has left comments and kudos; I am glad to be entertaining you :)

The sun was setting before Malia left Peter's apartment.

After she'd pointed out the injuries to his neck—and really, how had he missed those? They looked days old at least, though given the healing factor and the alpha-claw factor she couldn't guess when they'd actually been inflicted—he'd had no more strength than it took to climb into his bed and fall asleep.

She'd been left standing there, awkwardly, until the cockatoo decided to fly down to its keeper in apparent concern. It had cawed "Shut up! Shut up!" and tugged on his ear with its sharp beak, but Peter had slept through it without responding.

His temperature and heart rate had returned to normal within a minute though, so there was that. Maybe he had some kind of super werewolf-attacking bug, and he just needed to rest. It wasn't really her problem after all, no matter how much it bugged her in turn.

Leaving him to rest, she'd amused herself exploring Peter's apartment in more detail. First the fridge, because she was hungry and he _had_ made the offer to get her something before his little fit. There was a packet of cold Italian salami slices in the fridge, and some kind of upmarket ramen in his cupboard. She'd done some homework in between bites, congratulating herself for using less and less red marker every day.

Most of the books he had looked boring, but there was a planner on the counter next to the fridge that had caught her attention.

_Maybe he has his evil schemes written down here,_ she'd thought. _Wednesday, 09:00 am, use Death Star to destroy Scott McCall's house from orbit. 11:00 am, trade Cockatrice in for long-haired white cat_. Stiles had been making her watch too many movies, perhaps.

Cockatrice had flown down to her side as if in protest to the idea of being traded for a cat—or possibly just for some of the noodles from the cup she'd been eating from. Regardless, she lifted the plastic cover off the top and looked at the calendar for the week they were in.

**"Tuesday: FYMWIC—TDK. With Derek? N/A—TRY NEXT WEEK"**

She frowned. The acronym (word of the day, three weeks ago last Friday) was vaguely suspicious to her, though that may have just been because it was in Peter's oddly synthetic-looking handwriting.

**"Friday: PTA Meeting, 19:00. See MM."**

PTA meeting tomorrow? What the hell? Did she have a teacher whose initials were 'MM'? And what would Peter be doing talking to one of her teachers anyway, if this was even about her? No, this too made her suspicious. She took a picture with her camera-phone, feeling a little spy-like.

A sudden nervousness made her turn around to ensure Peter was still asleep. He was. She bent down to stare Cockatrice in the eye.

"Not a word of this to Darth Vader over there," she told him. "Remember, bird: snitches get stitches."

She'd heard that somewhere.

"Pleasant dreams!" said the bird.

_RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING!_

Malia jumped when she heard the doorbell ring. So focussed had she been on monitoring Peter's heart rate so she could leave before it seemed like he was waking up, that she hadn't been paying attention to what was going on outside the apartment. She switched focus of her senses to the vicinity of the door immediately, scenting the air.

And not just him. There was an older, similar male with him. The Sherriff. She cocked her head to see what she could hear.

"He's probably not even in," Stiles was saying. "I mean I think he spends most of his time hanging around Derek's loft, waiting to jump out of the shadows and throw sarcasm at unsuspecting victims. He's like the little devil that sits on everyone's shoulder; like... like Gollum telling Smeagol to take the Ring and join the dark side of the Force!"

There was a pause before the Sherriff replied, and in a voice which spoke of something he'd been stuck on for a while now; "... he _kidnapped_ you!?"

"Yes! Geez, Dad, how many times do I have to tell you—it was only a little kidnapping. Before he died the first time, and we tend to put everything that happened during that period down to temporary psychosis... of the kind where you're completely calm and rational for much of the time, but the point is that since then he hasn't done anything to hurt us. That we know of."

Another pause.

"Dad, you're not actually thinking of doing anything about it, are you? 'Cause you know the guy is still a werewolf of highly questionable character who could kill you at the drop of a hat."

"Okay, you look like you're going to do something about it. Don't say I didn't warn you though, because I did."

Malia could feel the Sherriff's anger through the door; not just at Peter but a less piercing, frustrated anger with Stiles as well. Curious to see how it would play out, she pulled the door away from the frame it was resting against and put it to the side.

Beacon Hills' town Sherriff and his son stood before her, the one angry enough that she could see a vein throbbing beneath red skin on his forehead, the other nervous and fidgeting until he saw her and went still.

"Malia!" he gasped, and took her hands in his own with a sigh of relief. "We were worried!"

She shrugged, because she didn't know what to say to that. Fortunately though, it seemed that had been all Stiles wanted to say on the matter anyway, because he didn't go into it any further. Just let it be.

The Sherriff, on the other hand, was not letting things be. He pushed past and into the apartment.

"Is Hale here?" he asked.

With a gesture to the bed she nodded. "He's sleeping right now."

"Sleeping? It's not even nightfall..." Stiles pointed out.

The Sherriff stopped abruptly in what had been a storm over towards Peter, staring at the teenagers for an explanation. Stiles approached the bed cautiously, head tilted to the side in observation. In the past hour Peter had moved vaguely into the recovery position Lydia had taught Malia earlier in the year, and hadn't stirred at all during the arrival of the Stilinskis.

Stiles' first observation was less than useful.

"What, is he allergic to shirts now?"

"He was having some kind of episode and he took it off."

"Episode?" Worry crept into the bewilderment on Stiles' face. "What do you mean by episode?"

"I think he's sick," she told him. "He was being his usual evil self when I first got here and then he randomly almost fainted and had to lie down." She shrugged again. "He said he'd be fine."

" _Would_ be fine? Malia, he's a werewolf, he should be fine now because werewolves aren't supposed to get sick!" Stiles was abruptly far more anxious than she'd have expected, and was running his fingers through his hair. "This is not good! Not for Peter anyway, which I'll admit I won't be shedding any tears over, but more importantly it might not be good for us if he is sick and whatever he has is catching and you and Scott and the others get it too!"

Malia hadn't thought of that. Still—

"I did get sick one time when I was living in the woods," she remembered, glancing at the Sherriff feeling Peter's forehead before taking his pulse, both of which he slept right through. It seemed odd that just a second ago he'd been ready to attack the man for kidnapping his son, and now he was making sure he was all right.

Stiles blinked at her with concern. "Really?"

"I ate some road kill that had been dead too long."

"Okay. I think on the list of things I never wanted to hear you say, that was somewhere in the low hundreds. Anyway, I'm pretty sure Peter doesn't habitually dine on road kill."

At that point Cockatrice flew over from the kitchen counter and landed boldly on the Sherriff's shoulder, crying out "Lullaby! Lullaby!"

"AAARGH!"

The Sherriff yelled and flung his arm out wildly. Cockatrice flapped away from him and onto the bed at once. Malia laughed. Stiles tried not to.

"Shut up, Peter!" said the bird, hopping onto Peter's chest. "LMAO!"

Furiously, the Sherriff turned towards the two teenagers, not saying a word. Since Stiles was trying so hard not to laugh at him Malia supposed she should do the same, and stopped, but the Sherriff still glared tight-lipped at the two of them.

"I may have forgotten to mention that Peter has a pet cockatoo," Stiles said, index finger extended.

"LMAO!" said Cockatrice.

The Sherriff took a deep, calming breath. "For the sake of my blood pressure, I will say nothing. Anyway, his pulse seems fine and he isn't running a fever, though I don't know how he slept through all that. Were you thinking of telling Derek about this or do you think we should just leave it?"

"Definitely tell Derek," said Stiles, slipping back into a more serious frame of mind. "Just in case it is catching. Maybe Deaton too, if Derek doesn't know."

"In that case I'll come back and beat the crap out of him later," said the Sheriff. "You two, downstairs and in the car. Now."

Malia was careful to leave the door in a position that wouldn't allow Cockatrice to escape the apartment. The bird was kind of like Scott, it had this way of making people instantly like it. Maybe it was some kind of magic bird, or a demon in the form of a bird that was Peter's conduit to Lucifer—that was something else they could ask Deaton.

They also left Peter exactly as he was, and Cockatrice on guard-bird duty. Malia couldn't deny there was a tinge of worry in her chest for him, but she didn't think it was because he was her biological father. Rather it was simple concern for the continuity of an asset to the pack and, she supposed, a part of her life—however small.

She said so as she climbed into the passenger seat of the Sherriff's car, making sure to get there before Stiles did, and twisting to speak to him as he got in the back.

"Stiles?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you think it's weird that I'm kind of worried about him? I mean, not _much_ , but still some." She hoped he'd approve of that; showing concern for others and all. He liked it when she did that.

Stiles gave her a look she remembered seeing on her father's face many years ago when she'd told him she'd had a nightmare. Sympathy, but without true concern, which was all right because the concern would have been for Peter, not for her. He comforted her anyway.

"Hey, he survived death, which is something few people can say. He's probably just having a bad reaction to some spell he did to make himself super-powerful so he can kill us all and become Emperor of Beacon Hills."

Malia grinned. "That's what I thought too!" she said excitedly. Then she took her phone out of her pocket. "Here, I took a picture of the first page of his diary; what do you think it means?"

Beside her the Sherriff snorted and rolled his eyes before starting the car. They took off back towards Stiles' house while Stiles looked over the screen at the page she'd recorded. For some reason, he looked sad.

"What is it?"

"FYMWIC," he said, pointing at the acronym.

"Phimwick?" asked the Sherriff, eyes narrowed in confusion.

"No, Dad, not 'phimwick', that isn't even a word. I think I know what it stands for though, we use 'FMMWIW' in the pack."

That wasn't something Malia was familiar with. She tried to push down feelings of being left out that she didn't know for certain were necessary.

"We do?" she asked.

"Yeah, for you," said Stiles. "FMMWIW is 'Films Malia Missed While In the Woods'. It's how we send messages for movie nights."

"Like _Twilight_ ," said Malia, because mentioning that film always got a good reaction.

As usual, Stiles turned his face away. "I swear, if Kira wasn't both my best friend's girlfriend and my girlfriend's best friend I would literally kill her for showing you that movie. 'I stopped liking them when I was thirteen', yeah right you did."

"So 'phimwick' is... ?" the Sherriff asked over Malia's chuckling.

"I'm guessing, 'Films You Missed While In a Coma'. TDK is probably _The Dark Knight_ ; I guess he would have still been in a coma when that came out. Surprised he hasn't seen it already though."

The Dark Night? As opposed to those really sunny nights?

"Maybe we could all see it together," she said.

"All as in you, me, Scott, Kira and Lydia, or all as in all of the above plus Peter?"

It was clear Stiles hoped she'd say the former. But Malia saw no reason to pretend otherwise.

"And Derek, if he wants to," she said.

Stiles frowned, like he did when he was looking at police photos he was trying to solve a crime for.

"You're getting along that well with him?" he asked her.

At first Malia didn't know how he'd think that was the case, but then thinking back over what she'd said, and the fact that she'd gone over to his house at all, she could kind of see where he'd got that impression. And maybe it wasn't a wrong impression—because on the spot she couldn't think of another reason for wanting to see a movie with him.

"I guess," she said slowly. "I mean, he's still yet to show any redeeming qualities or anything, but... well, I don't know. I was all angry and frustrated earlier in the day and then I went over and talked to him and now I feel better, and it's not like he said anything that should make me feel better."

"What did you talk about?" asked the Sherriff.

"He showed me a photo of all our family who burned in the fire," she told them, and as she did wondered for the first time how that particular photo had escaped the fire. "Then he said I should seduce Scott so I could kill him when his guard was down and become the alpha."

Silence ensued.

Stiles stared hard at her and seemed to have difficulty comprehending what she'd told him, or speaking any kind of reply. He stuttered for a second then finally came out with—

"Was he being serious?"

Malia considered it—the tone of voice Peter had used, the body language.

"I don't know," she decided.

The Sherriff tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

"Oh, _hell_!" he growled. "What else does it say in that damn diary?"

Stiles snapped out of it and glanced back down at the picture. "Oh, uh... 'Friday, PTA, seven pm. See MM'. Huh, PTA? Somehow he didn't strike me as a—"

"Wait, Friday at seven?" the Sherriff repeated.

"Yeah." Stiles leaned forward. "Why, is there a PTA meeting that you know of—"

"No, there isn't a PTA meeting!" the Sherriff snapped. "That's when me, and Melissa, and Liam and Kira's parents get together for our parents-of-supernatural-crime-fighters support group that you've all pushed us into forming. I don't know how the hell he knows about it!"

"Melissa and I," Malia corrected him, as Lydia so often did for her.

Sherriff Stilinski looked about as grateful for the correction as she usually was.

"The point is that MM has to be Melissa McCall. And whatever he wants to see her for I'm betting he's up to no good."

"So, definitely tell Scott about that one too?" asked Stiles.

"Definitely." The Sherriff took a different turn after the next light, over towards Derek's rather than his own house. "Hell, maybe we should go back and read the rest of his diary, if that's what you got from the first page. Maybe he'll have a secret meeting with Malia's mother in there somewhere."

"Dad, weren't you listening to a word I said earlier?" Stiles sighed. "Derek's mom removed Peter's memories of Malia with her alpha-powers, so he has no idea who her mother is, that's why it's so difficult for us to find out; otherwise Scott could just drag the memory out of his mind."

"Well, have you checked her birth certificate?"

Stiles rolled his eyes and raised hands. "Dad, that is..." he trailed off. "... probably the first thing we should have done and I can't believe I didn't think of it before now. God, I'm an idiot!"

"Fresh pair of eyes, son," said the Sherriff, tapping twice right next to said eyes. "Happens to all of us. Do you know if your parents went for a closed adoption, Malia?"

"Malia?"

Malia blinked, staring back at the direction Peter's apartment complex had been in.

"Maybe he is sick," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"I was just thinking," she said. "Scott's mom is a nurse, right? So maybe he is sick."

"No, he'd go to Deaton if he was sick, wouldn't he?"

There was another silence then, and one that lasted longer than before, because no one really knew what he would do, Malia least of all.

 

 

*~*~*~*~*

 

 

"Random fainting?" Derek repeated, looking at Stiles and Malia's expectant faces. Stiles nodded and folded his arms. Derek sighed. "I don't know," he told them. "And right now I don't particularly care."

_Well, that's a lie_ , a little voice in his head laughed at him. He tried to ignore it. There were bigger issues at hand that were sending impulses to claw up through his body. He went on:

"Right now our problem is with what Scott and Liam found on patrol."

He heaved the severed deer head out of the plastic bag and dumped it on the table in front of the two teenagers and the Sherriff.

"Oh, oh!" Stiles cried. "Oh, that is nasty, Derek—put that away, god! A little warning might have been nice!"

Derek ignored Stiles too.

"See the mark they carved into the forehead?" He found himself speaking more to Malia than the Stilinksis, instinctually trying to educate the younger member of the pack.

Of the _family_. Peter's _daughter_. He still couldn't quite wrap his head around it. Stiles was pack too, of course, but he wasn't wolf, so the supernatural bond wasn't there—not that that made the bonds they did have any weaker.

"What is that, a broom?" asked the Sherriff.

"A tree," Derek told them. Even though he was looking at it for the umpteenth time it still sent a chill down his spine. "It's a challenge to our pack. It means they intend to put down roots here."

"What about the infinity symbol on the back?" asked Stiles.

"The lemniscate? That means they want to form bonds. The two symbols are rarely used in combination with each other anymore, which suggests we're dealing with an old line of born wolves who hold to many of the old traditions."

He was trying to arouse Malia's interest in said traditions, but she was licking her lips hungrily at the sight of the deer and that suggested maybe he'd be better off putting the deer head away.

"I don't get it," said the Sherriff. "They want to form bonds... but also challenge you?"

"It's complicated. Basically they want to take over, but absorb our pack into theirs rather than chasing us off or exterminating us. I'm guessing they heard about Scott being a true alpha and want the prestige of having one for themselves."

Scott made another pained groan in the corner where he, Liam and Lydia were hanging out on the couch.

"Why can't all these people just leave us alone!?" he complained.

"Hey," Stiles replied. "Downside of being the hot girl."

"Nn."

Derek shook his head. "I'm not sure I want to know what goes on in your head," he announced, then wrapped the head of the deer back in the plastic. "I don't know if they're going to want to get Scott to kill his pack like Deucalion wanted, if they're going to start coming after us themselves, or if they're really stuck in the dark ages they might want to marry us in—"

"Wait, _marry_?" said Scott, shooting up in his seat.

"It does still happen in some packs," said Derek. He'd meant 'mate' rather than 'marry', but used the latter for ease of understanding. "And it's not pretty. Now, our biggest problem is that I'm picking up a lot of distinct scents from the head. At least a dozen, probably more. The bigger the pack the stronger each individual member is, and the stronger the alpha is."

"So we are all going to die..." said Stiles.

Malia slapped the back of his head so no one else had to. She truly was fitting in, Derek felt—far more than her father did, at any rate, though he supposed Peter had burrowed his way into a small dark corner of Derek's heart at least and dug in like a stain that refused to scrub out. Or maybe he was clinging to the outside of Derek's heart with little hooks, looking in, and Derek couldn't shake him loose however hard he tried.

_Random fainting_. Shit, he really had to focus on the bigger issue. Peter could sort his own problems out.

"We're not going to die," Scott said, with a voice Derek knew the others believed. He believed it. "We don't even know anything about this pack. Maybe we can talk to them before they do anything stupid. Maybe they have a problem they need our help with, and they just think they need me in their pack?"

Those qualifiers made Derek smile. He knew he should be exasperated when Scott said things like that, but over time he'd come to find it endearing enough that he couldn't help but smile.

"The good news," he said, interrupting the various eye-rolling the others were responding to Scott's musings with, "is that since they are such a large pack they should be easy to spot. Keep an eye out for new students, new teachers, new deputies," he glanced pointedly at the Sherriff, "and any new faces around town in general. Remember, some wolves can mask their presence, so be extra vigilant."

The teens nodded. Sherriff Stilinski ran his fingers through his hair.

"I guess I can take a look at all the new applications that have to go through the Sherriff's office," he said. "Maybe access some of the council records in case they pop up there."

"In the mean time, I don't think anyone should go anywhere alone," Derek added.

"Liam and Stiles can stay with me tonight," Scott offered.

"And Malia," said Lydia, rising to her feet, "will stay with me." She held her arm out to the coyote and then just took her hand when Malia stared at her in confusion. "We're having steak."

Malia's face lit up at once.

"I'm there," she said.

"Perfect. Someone remember to call Kira and tell her what's going on," Lydia said, herding Malia to the door.

Scott's face split into a dopey grin.

"I will!" he offered. "Derek, can you make sure they get home okay?"

"Sure," said Derek. He had nothing better to do.

_You can go see Peter afterwards_ , he told himself. Not to mop his brow or sing him to sleep or anything. Just to make sure he wasn't dead. And that his apparent illness wasn't anything that could hurt the pack.

A sudden thought occurred to him that whatever was wrong with Peter might have had something to do with the pack encroaching on their territory; like maybe they'd poisoned him or something. It seemed like an odd choice for an opening move on their part, but you never knew.

He shook his head and followed the girls out of the loft. "Lock up when you're leaving," he called over his shoulder, and shut the door.

It wasn't until they were in the car that anyone spoke, and Derek took the time to think this challenge over, because it was unfair to expect Scott to understand it after just a few lines of explanation even if he was the alpha.

Chances were that this was the kind of pack that hunters were supposed to take care of. Wolves who took pride in being wolves and thought it made them better than humans. A pack stuck in a phase that most wolves passed through when they were teenagers.

Derek couldn't deny that being what he was made him feel special, but that was more being a part of the pack than being super-human. The pack was what made a wolf strong. _Family._

'Feral packs' as he'd sometimes heard them referred to were often steeped in archaic traditions like bride-snatching, territory expansion rituals—coming of age ceremonies that Talia wouldn't even discuss. In fact, the few times the subject had come up had been some of the only times he'd seen his mother angry.

And he couldn't really blame her. Packs like seemed to exist to make things with hunters worse. Much as Derek's family had been almost destroyed unprovoked by the Argents, he couldn't deny that the reverse had happened in other places. And feral packs didn't think much of those wolves who tried to live at peace with humans. 'Domesticated', they thought of them. Targets for new territory and new blood.

_"So this is what a den of tame dogs looks like. Guess that makes it more of a kennel than a den."_

_"I'm going to say this once, and only once, Jethro. Leave my property immediately and I won't have to show you just how tame we're not."_

_"Oh, Mrs. Hale, I think you're going to want to hear me out about this."_

The random memory of a fraction of a conversation sprung into his mind without warning, giving him no clue as to when he'd heard it or what context he'd heard it in. The male voice, 'Jethro', had been southern, but he couldn't remember more than a blurry figure to put to that voice, nor the expression his mother had worn when she'd hissed her warning at him.

Had Talia dealt with a feral pack on their territory sometime during his childhood?

All the more reason to see Peter, he supposed. He tried not to feel too tense about the situation. It would only make him too tired to deal with whatever was coming.

He felt almost too tired already.

"So, other than telling you to kill Scott, how else did your meeting with your bio-dad go?" Lydia asked Malia, shutting the door to the driver's seat. Derek got in the back without a word.

Malia shrugged. "He's pretty much an asshole," she said.

Derek snorted. That kind of summed it up, didn't it?

Lydia seemed to approve of the appraisal as well, smiling smugly. "So you won't go back again then?"

"Actually I think I will," Malia said. The car started and she was looking out the window as she spoke, seemingly genuinely interested in the scenery. "Talking to him kind of made me calmer. Not when he was actually speaking, but afterwards. For some reason I didn't feel as angry."

"That's because Peter is pack," said Derek, also looking out the window. "Being around members of the pack calms us down on instinct, especially if it's a member we see less of because separation from that member adds to subconscious anxiety."

"Well that sucks," said Lydia, smile giving way to disgust. "You'd think it would be cancelled out by him being the spawn of Satan."

That _was_ something you'd think, and certainly it had been the case in the past, but for some reason Derek wasn't feeling as badly-disposed towards Peter as usual. Especially odd since he'd been keeping the truth about Malia from him, and Malia herself just shrugged it off.

It almost made him think that there was more going on than—

"Derek?"

Lydia's voice went from annoyed to frightened without pause. Derek leaned forward and looked up ahead, in the same direction the banshee had her eyes fixed in, wide and with the pupils shrinking. The car headlights had illuminated four figures standing by the side of the road; a man, a boy about Scott's age, a girl about Liam's age, and a woman.

The man was holding a sign in one arm, like you would if you were picking someone you didn't know up from the airport. The other arm was stretched out, thumb pointing out.

The sign said ' SCOTT MCCALL?' in huge red letters.

Lydia stopped the car before they got too close, and Malia growled and was about to open the door before Derek reached out and put a hand on her shoulder.

"Wait," he told her. "We don't know what they want."

There was no doubt in his mind that these were members of the pack that was challenging them, and holding the sign up like that hardly spoke of honourable intentions—no, this was deliberately mocking them. But what they hoped to achieve by it was so far a mystery.

Then Malia jerked out of his grasp.

"They don't scare me," she told him, and opened the door.

Derek cringed.

"Stay in the car," he told Lydia.

The night air was cool; not intolerable for a human and vaguely pleasant for a stressed werewolf, while visibility was quite good with the moon out and the sky not yet as dark as it would be. Derek hastened to Malia's side to hold her back and saw the eyes of the younger wolves in front of them glowing blue with excitement, like Malia's. The blue set his teeth on edge, especially from the girl.

She was so young.

"Now, what did I tell you, Courtney?" said the large male, under his breath so no human would have been able to hear it. "That there's a true blue."

It didn't escape Derek's notice that the wolf had the same accent as the one in his memory.

Malia growled loud enough that it threatened to become a roar, enticing the two teenagers to begin approaching her slowly. They were both blonde, the boy in jeans and bare-chested, the girl in nothing but jeans and a bra. Derek put his hands on Malia's shoulders.

"What do you want?" he asked them, trying to sound calm.

The woman laughed, leaned forward and tapped the cardboard sign, a strand of metallic, bottle-red hair falling in front of grey eyes. She looked closely enough related to the man to be a sibling, and Derek guessed the teens were the children of one of them.

"We were just looking for a Scott McCall," she said, laughing more. "We're his new neighbours, see. Thought we'd introduce ourselves."

The boy snapped his jaws at them, grinning. The girl copied him a second later.

"You must be Derek Hale," said the man, a casual and almost dreamlike quality about him. "You was just a little thing when I saw you last, though we never were formally introduced. Looks like this puppy grew into a big dog."

He paused.

"And this must be Malia."

That was more than enough for Malia, who transformed completely, clothes ripping off her body and fur slipping through Derek's fingers as she fell on all fours. That and the little gasp Lydia made inside the car distracted Derek from this man's insinuation that they'd met before.

The strange wolves were not unaffected either. Seeing someone effect a full transformation had the teenagers shuffle back, and the adults stand up straighter. A part of Derek that wasn't afraid was kind of proud, but he rushed forward and put a hand over the scruff of Malia's neck all the same.

"Well now," said the man. "That is just spectacular, don't you think? As good as old Talia Hale could do it and then some—you remember what Talia could do, right, Court?"

"I surely do," said the woman, forcing a smile onto a face trying to contort with fear.

In contrast, the man didn't seem to have an ounce of fear in him. He handed his sign to the woman, strolled casually past the teens and crouched down about two metres in front of Malia, eyes boring into hers.

"What do you know about my mother?" Derek snapped.

He received no answer. The wolf's attention was fixed solely on Malia.

"Who are you?!" she growled at them, with some difficulty in her full coyote form.

"Why, Malia," he replied, eyes glinting with just enough red to make Derek unsure he'd seen any. "We're your _family_."

 

 

 

*~*~*~*~*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter is over half done and will be half Lowells, half Peter in terms of POV. Leave me kudos, criticisms, marriage proposals, death threats or whatever else comes to mind and have a good evening.


	5. IV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I think we can consider this fic pretty much jossed. Yay! Of course, the alternative was to wait to write it until the end of Season 4 and risk not having the will to do so, thus missing a golden opportunity to inflict my writing on the unsuspecting fandom, muahahahaha!
> 
> Anyway, enjoy a slightly shorter chapter than usual, in which the Lowells have a family meeting and Derek goes to visit Peter. Thank you to everyone who left comments/kudos, you guys are the best :)

 

_... so that even if you're not on the same level yourself at least you'll reflect a little of his brilliance. It's like the clever archer who senses that his target is too far off, knows the limitations of his bow, and so aims far higher than he normally would, not because he really wants his arrow to go that high, but because—_

"Did you see that! Did you see that, Daddy, did you see it!"

Scowling, Jethro snapped the book shut and rubbed his forehead. That damn Lily was always yelling and shouting and jumping around, annoying hyperactive little shit. He could tune out the various mutterings of the omegas and the bitching of the other betas—the inane babbling of the small children, but that high-pitched chirpy voice just cut through to him every time.

"Aw, man, looks like they're back!"

That and Robin's low, nasal drawl. If he could pick two people he'd as soon as replace with a pair of talking Furbies, never mind Peter and Malia Hale, he'd wrap those two up in a nice shiny bow and have them shipped over to Madagascar, or whatever was furthest away from him.

Mere seconds passed before Elijah opened the door, without knocking, and announced, "Lawrence and the others are back, Uncle Jethro," then left before getting any kind of response.

Jethro slammed the book down on the floor in annoyance. It was going to be murder to get anything done around this place, and like as not one or more of the idiots downstairs would bring the human authorities down on their heads sooner or later, and then they'd all be looking at a bloodbath.

Not that the blood would be theirs, but it would mean they'd have to leave the state, and if that happened before they got what they wanted from the McCall pack...

"A full transformation! Just like Talia Hale used to do! Daddy was right, Malia is a true wolf, through and through!"

"And that Hale fellow was blue-eyed and all!" Henry exclaimed, voice getting louder as Jethro skulked down the stairs to greet him and his father with his usual lack of enthusiasm. "Man, maybe they ain't as much a pack of dogs as we thought!"

"Had a human driving the car though," said Courtney, plopping down on the makeshift sofa they'd fashioned from wooden crates, next to her younger brother. "Red-headed girl. No doubt she knew about the wolves, maybe she's one of their mates."

Redford glanced at his sister, frowning. "Wouldn't they a turned her, that being the case?" he asked.

"Not if they were too chicken to risk their pretty little bit of meat not taking to it," said Elsie with a snort. "We lost your sister that way, didn't we, Lizbet."

"Yes, Mistress," said Lizbet, staring blankly in the corner with the other omegas. Jethro shuddered every time he heard her speak.

"Ugh," said Redford. "I just don't see how they could not turn her."

Lawrence dragged another crate from the corner along the floor in a conspicuous fashion, slowly scraping it over the floor of the development they were staying in. The rest of the pack was silent while he placed it ahead of them and sat down.

"Come to think of it," he said. "I didn't get a close look, but I ain't entirely sure the girl in question _was_ human."

"From what I've heard this pack is a mixed bag," offered Jethro, sliding down onto the stairs, a little outside of the rest of them where he preferred it.

Courtney laughed. "That's for sure. I don't know what in the hell you heard about this pack, but our Malia sure as shit ain't no wolf."

"What?" said Henry, sounding even stupider than usual.

"Don't you know nothing, nephew? She could transform all the way well and good, but not into a wolf. Our little lost lamb is a little coyote."

Coyote? Well, that made sense.

"Coyote?" repeated Henry, as if he'd been told the girl was a unicorn. "What the hell, daddy? I ain't mating with no coyote—that ain't even a wolf!"

With a laugh, Lawrence reached over and ruffled the boy's hair. "Don't be discriminating now, boy—coyotes and wolves are kin enough, and it ain't like it's uncommon. We had one ourselves before Jamie was born, didn't we, Ann-Marie? You and Lucas? What did we call her again... ?"

Jethro heard Ann-Marie's heart increase and could sense the sadness begin to well up in her heart. He rolled his eyes; little though he might have cared for Ann-Marie, he had no wish for the pack to be distracted with their petty torments while they should have been having a serious conversation.

"It was a he, and she called him 'Freddie', Lawrence; can we get back to the matter at hand?"

"The matter at hand it is, Jethro—I apologise for going off track." Lawrence grinned. "Mama left the little guy out in the woods for the real wolves, but I ain't my mama now, am I? Don't worry about it, Henry, sometimes you get coyotes in a pack, sometimes jackals or foxes—heck, I even heard of one pack had a _hyena_ , now that was a turn-up! But we're all canines at the end of the day, ain't much difference between us. She's a pretty girl, looks a hell of a lot like your Aunt Lorraine did at her age, and any kids you had would be wolves."

Elsie shifted on her seat. "Uh, now that ain't a sure thing, Lawrence, and you know it."

"It would be so long as they did it in the proper way. But fair's fair, let's not count our chickens just yet. Robin, you and your brothers and sisters were going to write me up a little report on Scott McCall and his pack. You get anything done?"

A spike of alarm went through Jethro when he heard Lawrence had given that task to Robin, hell, that he'd given any task to Robin and expected something other than a pile of bodies to have come out of it, and Jethro hadn't smelled any blood on him so chances were he hadn't even got that far.

Indeed, Robin's mostly vacant eyes went immediately to his sisters, the only intelligent children Jethro's brother had managed to produce; and that only the girls had gotten brains made at least some kind of sense. Carlisle himself had never been the brightest bulb in the box, while Jemima was undeniably somewhat cunning. It still bothered Jethro more than in should have that Lawrence had wanted this information from that lot and not from someone who'd done the research that had taken them here in the first place.

What was going on in the alpha's head?

Rosetta pulled a few folded sheets of paper out of her pocket and Jethro pushed his concerns to the side for the moment so he could listen to her.

"We found out a few things," she said. "First off, they ain't a very formal pack. Scott McCall may be alpha, but he's still a minor, he doesn't lead the pack unless there's a crisis."

"Idiot," laughed Redford. Jethro couldn't help but wish he had a pot and a kettle at hand so he could use them to beat the younger wolf's head in until he no longer called others stupid.

Crystal took one of the pages from her sister. "The pack as it is, is eight members—six strong. We already know Peter Hale, though he ain't all that close with the rest of the pack; way I hear it he killed his niece Laura after coming out of a coma so he could be the alpha, though he ain't that anymore by any definition. Scott McCall definitively is, being he's a true alpha and, as I hear it, can even break mountain ash barriers with his strength."

Lawrence winced.

"The others ain't so impressive," Rosetta assured him. "Derek Hale's the first, and after Peter the most experienced. Malia Tate, we know about. Kira Yukimura is some kind of were-fox—"

"Kitsune," said Crystal.

"That's Japanese for were-fox though, right?"

Groaning, Jethro gave the girls an exasperated glare. "It really ain't, girls. Now, is she a kitsune or a were-fox, because they're two very different things and the former's a darn sight trickier to deal with."

"Definitely kitsune," said Crystal.

Great. Jethro would have to read up on those now. _Japanese for were-fox indeed_.

"... and Liam Dunbar, yellow-eyed beta who I think is the newest addition to the pack."

"He must have been only a few months bit by the scent of it," Robin piped up, surprising Jethro by actually saying something worth saying. "Had that same scent Jackie had at the time; when we left the deer's head it looked like the McCall kid was trying to teach him. Maybe he's taking him as a mate?"

Lawrence held a hand up. "Let's not speculate now, Robin," he said hastily.

Crystal went on, "Leaving Lydia Martin—who you must have seen in the car, and Stiles Stilinski, who as far as I can tell are both human."

"Stilinski..." Jethro repeated, the name ringing a bell. "Stilinski... the Sherriff in charge of Malia's case was Stilinski, if I remember right."

"This 'Stiles' is his boy," said Rosetta. "Don't know if he knows about all this, though."

"Well then, that's something for you and your sister to find out," Lawrence said, standing up. "In fact that'll be your task 'til I say otherwise. Gathering information and laying low. Jethro?"

He nodded his head towards the door to say he wanted a private word out of earshot of the others. Jethro got to his feet sighing and went to follow him.

"Lawrence?" said Redford, also making to follow them. "Ain't we going to plan an attack?"

"Not just yet, baby brother," said Lawrence. "You stay put now; I need to talk to Uncle Jethro."

_Ain't your uncle_ , griped Jethro in his mind, long past the days when he still complained about it out loud.

The night air was cool, the breeze gentle, and the air around Beacon Hills thrummed with unrealised potential. Jethro followed Lawrence out onto the porch of the house they were squatting in and couldn't help but notice Marcus sitting by himself on his satanic video-gaming thing, Nintendo POS or whatever it was. Damn, did he ever do anything else? Lazy kid.

He was at the foot of the steps and Jethro was more than happy to pass him by without a lick of acknowledgement, but Lawrence paused and regarded his youngest for a while.

"You okay there, son?" he asked.

Marcus shrugged.

"You think maybe next time you'll sit in on the meeting? You're almost getting to be a man now, cub, you have to sit at the big boys' table sooner or later."

"Nn," said Marcus.

"Go on and get to bed now," said Lawrence, sighing. Marcus did as he was told without saying a word, hopping up the steps before disappearing into the dark house.

Lawrence was standing there, shaking his head, long after the boy was gone.

"He's an odd one," he commented at length, turning towards the woods. "No mistake about that."

_Kind of like you at that age_ , thought Jethro.

Out loud he said, "I suppose there's a reason you're hanging back and giving McCall and the Hales time to mount a defence; an offence even, if they find us too quickly."

"We gave them the slip pretty easily," Lawrence told him, walking further into the trees. "As for why I'm waiting, let's get a little further away from the house."

Right then he put an arm around Jethro's waist, and Jethro growled, but allowed the touch, because he may have thought Lawrence had long since outgrown _that_ stage, but he was still the alpha and either way it was his right.

"Don't worry," Lawrence chuckled, turning his head so he was whispering right into Jethro's ear. "While I can't say I haven't missed your company in that regard, I will admit I'm mostly putting on a show to ward off prying ears from following us."

Jethro rolled his eyes. "You do whatever you think is best, Lawrence."

"I always do."

After a while Lawrence looked back at the direction of the house, then ahead of them, then scented the air and seemed satisfied that they were out of range of the others.

"I might have let slip to Hale and Malia," he said, "that we were her family."

"... all right." Jethro honestly didn't know where that was going.

"And I did so," Lawrence continued, backing Jethro up against a tree and stroking his hair lightly, "on account of you mentioning that birth certificate."

Ah. Now Jethro understood.

"They have resources we don't, you see," he said, "and I didn't want to say this in front of Robin, Rosetta or Crystal, but..."

"But you've piqued the girl's interest," Jethro finished for him, and sighed. "And now you want her to lead us to Luna-Lee."

Lawrence grinned; fangs, red eyes and all.

 

 

*~*~*~*

 

 

" _Choose a non-fiction text of significant historical importance from the last five hundred years and prepare a five-minute presentation to give to the class on said text. Remember to include—a. Biographical information on the author, b. Historical context, c. Reception of the work at the time of publication, d. Modern interpretations, e. Your personal thoughts. This presentation counts for ten percent of your final grade_."

"Shut up, Peter!"

Peter sipped at the rosé he'd poured out and ignored Cockatrice's suggestion. Now that he was a _parent_ —careful, careful, don't break the glass, you'll spill the wine. Just keep calm—it necessitated taking an interest in his child's education, and as far as he knew the woeful state of the public school system had changed little while he'd been in a coma. And then dead. He continued to read aloud from the printout, moving to the handwritten section and adopting a mocking tone.

" _'Malia—here is a short selection of texts you may like to try for this presentation. Essays of George Orwell, Freud's 'The Ego and the Id', Marx's 'Communist Manifesto'. Please feel free to see me if you need any help._ ' I think with that selection you might be the one who needs help, Yukimura."

"Pleasant dreams!" said Cockatrice.

With a snort Peter put the paper down. "Not if she reads Freud, that's for sure."

He drained the rest of the glass and dumped it in the sink before making his way over to his bookshelves. He at least had a few texts that fit the criteria of the assignment that _weren't_ incredibly boring, and if he couldn't help Malia murder her way to absolute power then he could at least help her with her homework.

It was more responsible of him that way, he told himself, and that left the option of absolute power open for him to take someday.

The little library he had threatened to depress him, though, as he ran his finger along the new and glossy spines of the books. Seven years ago he'd have known exactly where on his shelves the book he wanted was; he could have told by scent in the dark if he'd had to, and he could have given her a copy filled with his own annotations and the inscription from his grandmother who'd given it to him shortly before her death.

_"You're going through your 'edgy' phase, I can tell. Better take this so you can complete the look."_

All gone. He paused in front of the shelf. It was stupid to be upset about it, considering six years and the better part of a dozen lives had been burned away in that fire. Who cared about a pile of paper he could replace with a few clicks on Amazon? He had almost all the books he'd lost; he'd even reacquired the kid's books that had stayed on his shelf out of nostalgia.

Well, all the ones he could remember, anyway. That always made him uncomfortable. The feeling that he was still missing some of the pieces that he had before, but wasn't able to tell exactly what he needed to get back.

However on this occasion he did manage to locate his quarry. He picked it out, carried it back to his kitchen table and wrapped the paper with the assignment on it around the book.

"TRY THIS?" he scrawled beneath the teacher's note.

It was just as he was slipping it back into Malia's bag that he heard the approaching figure.

Down on the street below the steps of an oncoming person were slowing down as they came to the front door of the building, and Peter could smell Derek when he inhaled deeply. Derek, and fear.

Fear? Peter could think of no reason for that. Unless it had something to do with the marks on the back of his neck, but that was something Peter was trying not to think about, because the answer to why they were there was so obvious, and so horrific, that he really didn't feel like dealing with it.

There had to be another explanation, after all.

There _had_ to be.

Derek didn't like rosé, so Peter got the scotch from the top of the fridge and waited for his door to come crashing down again as he felt Derek racing up the stairs. He hadn't had the time to do more than glue the hinges back on to the frame, so the door was still unattached to its posts and at least there wouldn't be any more damage done to the apartment due to his nephew's enthusiasm.

To his surprise the door only fell down this time because Derek actually knocked on it. Cockatrice flew back up to his favourite spot on the hanging light and Peter observed Derek standing there in the doorway, looking a touch sheepish with the door fallen like that. He must have forgotten what had happened the previous night.

"Hi, Derek," he said, pouring the scotch.

"Pack a bag," said Derek, without formality.

Peter put the bottle down on the table. "Pack a bag..." he repeated slowly, tilting his head. "Are you kicking me out? Or are we talking about going on that road trip we never got to realise."

"Firstly, the idea of going on a road trip with you was always more of a threat than a promise on your part. Secondly, this is for your own safety. There's a hostile feral pack in town and we're relocating everyone to the loft until we deal with the problem."

"And I count as part of 'everyone'? Derek, I'm touched."

To Peter's surprise, Derek came over and reached for the scotch, downing it in one gulp. Peter had met a feral pack once, slumming around during the Spring Break of his sophomore year in college, and found them to be the stupidest, most impulsive, inbred and frankly disgusting band of inhuman trash he'd ever come across.

Not to say he was sad he had come across them. On the contrary, he'd found them fascinating—to think how they'd survived so long with seemingly so little survival instinct was a conundrum Peter was confounded by to this day. One of them had actually asked him to join their pack and become her mate before even telling him her _name_.

So perhaps mention of a feral pack was not striking the fear it should have into Peter, because it wasn't as if the single example that he knew of was a model for all of them. Talia for one had always held them in special contempt.

Nevertheless, he was undaunted until Derek explained further.

"They left an Arboreal and a Lemniscate carved onto a severed deer head on the preserve, they know our names so they've clearly been stalking us, and less than two hours ago four of them stopped us in the middle of the road and informed your daughter that they were her family."

Peter's hand paused on its way to the glass and dropped to his side. He looked into his nephew's eyes and saw the seriousness of the situation reflected back at him, and for the moment he was speechless.

Derek took that rare opportunity to continue.

"All this makes me pretty sure they've been to Beacon Hills before. Now, I have a vague memory from about that time of someone named 'Jethro' coming to the house, but these wolves didn't give us their names; they took off into the forest and we lost them. I think one of them was called Courtney, but..." he trailed off. "If there's _anything_ you can remember about that time... ?"

The hand that had just fallen to his side now rose again, this time to trace over the marks on the back of his neck, and the long-since vanished wounds where Talia had made her alterations.

Anything that might have related to this had long since vanished from his mind too. Talia had wiped it all away, and short of getting in an ice bath and dying (again), there was little Peter could do about it. As for that ice bath, there were several reasons he didn't want to try it; first it was unlikely to have much success this long after the fact, second he was already adverse enough to fire without giving himself an ice-complex as well, thirdly...

_Well, never mind about thirdly for now. Not until tomorrow evening anyway._

"A feral pack?" he repeated slowly. "And Malia's mother is a member?"

His heart skipped a few beats and he could feel the slight numbness in his fingertips that preceded the extending of his claws. Was the woman he'd conceived a child with in Beacon Hills right now? What the fuck was he supposed to do about that?

"I don't think we should anticipate a joyful reunion just yet, seeing as they're basically here to become our overlords or more likely kill us when that doesn't work out for them."

"And until that time you figure we should all camp out at your place, toasting marshmallows and braiding each other's hair?"

Sarcasm was easier for Peter to fall back on than a dozen feather beds.

Anger was the same for Derek.

"Oh for fuck's sake, are you listening to a word I'm saying?!" he yelled. "There's a pack that's probably more than twice the size of ours gunning for us out there— _you are not safe on your own here_!"

Not safe, was he?

Maybe that was so, but was it really what Derek cared about?

They were at a point now where it would take far more than the memory of Laura for Derek to get rid of him twice and for all. If you wanted to be technical, he'd already avenged her death. Peter was his family, and his pack, and he'd known when he'd come back that those two facts would eventually lead to this point, wherein Derek wouldn't be able to take his life without further reason.

Pack was a supernatural bond, after all. It surpassed things most humans would consider unforgivable. But that didn't mean Peter was forgiven, not by a long shot, and nor would he have expected to be so even after fighting alongside each other had strengthened his pack bond with Derek.

Yet there was real concern in Derek's voice. And it was the first he'd heard of it from him since before he'd come out of his coma.

_And you know why it's happening now, don't you?_

He reached out and picked up the other glass of scotch. "All the same," he said. "I could never leave Cockatrice here undefended." He drank.

Derek put both hands on the table and leaned in towards him.

"Fine," he snarled. "Stay here and get killed by your hillbilly ex-girlfriend, whoever she is. I'll be protecting your daughter at the usual place."

Peter reached over for Malia's bag, extending the index finger on his other hand in a casual expression of 'wait just a moment'.

"Could you get this to her?" he asked. "She must have left it behind by accident."

Scowling, Derek snatched the bag out of his hands and suddenly stilled.

"You went through her things?" he asked—for some reason surprised, as if he'd never met Peter before.

"She went through mine," Peter replied childishly.

With the bag slung over his shoulder, Derek glared at him. "That reminds me," he said. "Stay away from Melissa McCall."

So they'd figured that one out? Peter rolled his eyes. Now he wouldn't be able to jump out and yell 'surprise' at the meeting.

"Or what?"

"Or I'll kill you."

_There's the Derek we know and love_ , thought Peter.

"That seems a little extreme. I just need to talk to her about something."

"Why, are you sick?"

Another beat skipped by as Peter tried to get his heart rate under control. But Derek must have noticed that.

"You _are._.. " he said incredulously. That unfounded concern was creeping into his voice, and Peter didn't like it. "Malia said you fainted while she was talking to you, but I never... is this something we should be bringing to Deaton?"

"I don't trust Deaton," said Peter, putting the scotch glass down before he broke it. "I'd rather talk to McCall first, and before you ask I know she's hardly an expert on werewolves, but she won't need to be to get me what I need."

"And what is it you need?"

Peter grinned. "That would be a breach of my private medical information, Derek."

Derek slammed his fist down on the counter, eyes flashing blue for a split-second.

"Damn it, Peter!" he snapped. "If there's something going on with you then I need to know!"

"Why?"

Jaw dropping, Derek looked for a second like he was going to reach out and strangle him, but chose not too after a few moments of fury so absolute that a familiar fear began to well up inside Peter's chest. He masked it well though.

"Because you're pack. And we need to face this together."

Times were strange. Peter was fainting all over the place, Derek was actually worried about him and lost memories stirred up by everything that was going on were floating into his mind at random; dark ghosts that had slipped through Talia's claws when she'd grabbed part of his mind and pulled it out of his head.

Like the one abruptly playing in his head in that moment.

_"Are you hurt, Peter? Mommy said you weren't feeling well. Would you like magic kisses?"_

_Soft little lips on his tear-stained cheeks in the darkness of his room._

_"Is it better now?"_

That had been Derek's voice. Whenever the children had hurt themselves Talia had used 'magic kisses'; just a peck and a pretence that it was the kiss and not the natural healing ability that got rid of the wound. Only Derek had ever been dumb enough to believe they were real, as far as he could remember. That had actually been something Peter had liked about him.

But the days in which he'd offer Peter anything like that were long since passed, and Peter didn't want to get into any of it right now. So he fell back on his feather bed.

"Right now I need for you to pay for that door, considering the financial difficulties we've been having."

He'd really expected Derek to hit him then. Yet Derek just closed his eyes and lowered his head.

There was a long silence before he said anything. And then...

"This isn't theatre, Peter. You're not stuck playing this role. You can grow up any time you feel like putting in the effort. And you know where to find us if you do."

Derek walked out without another word.

Something bitter stirred in Peter's inner core. Something that was a lot like being trapped in his own head, staring at the same wall day after day and begging inside his head for someone to put the fire that had consumed half his body out. Even though it had been long since doused. He stood up to put the door back in place so he could remind himself he wasn't paralysed anymore, but that wasn't really what was bothering him.

It was the being trapped on his own that was getting to him.

And the being trapped with someone who shouldn't have been there.

...

Ba-dum

(ba-dum)

...

He slid down against the door and hugged his knees to his chest.

...

Ba-dum

(ba-dum)

...

He tried to imagine he was holding someone else.

 

 

*~*~*~*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can anyone guess which text Peter has selected for Malia's presentation? Because I'd honestly be pretty surprised if no one could. Next chapter will be half Malia, half Peter, and hopefully will entertain whoever reads it. Leave your thoughts below!


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